


Why We Left, and Where We Went

by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: (Heroic) Zombies, Ariel Is Disabled and Genderfluid and Intersex, Attempted Incest, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Beauty is Hispanic, Bit of Meta, Bluebeard Elements, Cannibalism, Damaged Princesses, Dark, Disabled Characters, F/F, F/M, Fairy Tale Remixes, Fantasy Superpowers, Feminism, Genderfluid Characters, Hallucinations, Healing, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Indigenous Cinderella, Magic, Mentally Unbalanced Red Riding Hood, Not Based On My Actual Life, Other, Queer Characters, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rapunzel's Mother Is Asian, Sexism, Sexual Abuse, Sisterhood, Snow White Has A White Father And An Asian Mother, Transgender Characters, Transgender Tiana, Transphobia, Trauma, Unseemly Amounts of Blood And Gore, troubled characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:42:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 21
Words: 41,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26906806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters/pseuds/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Summary: “Go,” her mother says. “Go, because you are not safe here, and you may never be again. I cannot protect you, so you must run.”So the princess leaves, running away into the woods to find sanctuary. But the woods are full of girls fleeing dark versions of famous stories, and chance winds their fates together into a powerful knot.
Relationships: Ariel/Tiana, Gretel/Cinderella (Maybe), Non-Consensual Pairings, Scheherazade/OC
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	1. Once Upon A Fucking Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which secrets are revealed, a journey begins, and several characters are rather abruptly robbed of their happy endings.

Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen who had a beautiful daughter with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. When the daughter is fifteen, the queen noticed some...discrepancies in the way her husband treats their child; in the way he looked at her, touched her inky locks, mumbled her name into his pillow.

When she confronted him about it, he slapped her for her filthy mind and reminded her that there were other wombs in the world more likely to give sons than hers before storming out the door. He did not answer the question, and neither did her mirror, but she already knows.

She has her daughter called to her side immediately after the girl is finished with her horse ride, knowing that the princess's bedroom is no longer a sanctuary.

The girl slips into her mother's room and frowns at the makeup caking her face. They sit side by side at her vanity, the hoops they are meant to embroider lying limply in their hands. The queen stares fixedly at their twin reflections, so similar, as she whispers the truth: the king wants to hurt his daughter in ways no one should ever be hurt, and there is no force in the castle strong enough to deny him.

“Go,” her mother says. “Go, because you are not safe here, and you may never be again. I cannot protect you, so you must run.” She blinks as she whispers this, her eyelids moving faster than a hummingbird’s wings in a futile effort to keep the tears back.

The daughter refuses to believe this, at first. She claims that it is not as bad as all that, that her father’s love for her is pure. In a fit of desperation, she even accuses her mother of jealous madness.

But she has felt the weight of her father’s hungry looks, his strange gifts of jewels and fine underthings. She has felt her hands on her body for a heartbeat too long, fingers reaching where they should not go. She has seen her father’s royal shape looming outside her bedroom door, contemplating the threshold with hungry sighs. And in fairy tales, thresholds are meant to be crossed.

So she lets her mother snip away that beautiful black hair and bind those snow-white breasts, and hand her peasant boy’s clothes provided by the huntsman. 

The queen trusts the huntsman, for she has seen him exchange sly kisses and flowers with the gardener's boy when they think no one is watching. He will have no reason to harm the girl during their travels, and he is loyal to the queen for protecting his secrets.

The queen knows she is doing a cruel thing by sending the huntsman away from his beloved, but this is a cruel world, and you must harden yourself to survive in it. And because this is a cruel world, the queen must stay in order to cover up their departure for as long as she can, no matter how much the princess begs her to come with.

The queen gives her daughter a map leading to her sister, the princess’ aunt, a woman who traded crowns for potions long ago. “She will keep you safe, my angel, my snowflower,” the queen says. They embrace each other, shaking with the kind of pain that poison apples are nothing besides.

Then the princess shoulders her provisions, and the huntsman leads her into the woods. The queen watches them go and shatters her mirror, digging the shards into her fingers in an attempt to drown out the roaring in her heart, mixing tears with blood.

Long after they are gone the king realizes that his daughter is not sick or being tended to by her mother in womanly privacy. He bursts into her chambers and grabs the queen by the throat, screaming in rage and grief. 

She does not speak, even when he hurts her in the way he meant to hurt their child, even when he gives her over to men with hot irons and dead eyes. How can a woman who has ripped her beating heart from her own chest and tossed it into the wilderness ever fear pain again?

The princess and huntsman become good friends, bonding as only loss and fear can make people bond. He teaches her how to hunt and forage, how to stitch wounds and find her way through the undergrowth or by the stars. 

They share songs and stories, their voices mingling with the birds. She teases stories about the gardener's boy from him with all the avidness of a little sister. When one of them wakes up weeping from the memory of the person left behind, the other is there to stroke hair and provide comforting words.

They’ve stopped to replenish their stocks at a tavern when they hear the news. "Queen's been e'ecuted," says the toothless bartender, a dull gleam in his eyes. "She sent off 'er baby girl t'be eaten by dwarves or sumptin,' so 'is 'ighness had her sliced up and burned." 

The princess stops blinking, stops breathing, face slack beneath the brim of her cap and the disguising dirt smeared on her cheeks. When the Huntsman reaches for her hand, face pale and concerned, she doesn't seem to resister the contact.

"Serves da bitch right," mutters the bartender, dropping the coins provided to the huntsman by the bitch in question into his box. "Doing that to her own bibby, it's sick. Sumptin's wrong with people, I swear."

The huntsman decides to leave before anyone notices that his companion is not talking, eating, or making eye contact. As they make their way back to camp with their purchases, the princess leads the way, steps as stiff as a metronome. 

She climbs a tall tree the way the huntsman has taught her, worn leather boots disappearing into the darkness. He doesn't bother asking her to come back down. Far overhead, the huntsman can hear the sounds of sobbing.

In the icy branches of her tree, the princess takes stock of herself. Technically she knew this was a possibility, but she didn't really think that her beautiful, clever, invincible mother could be ripped away like this. Sometimes men like her father tried to do terrible things, but matters always turned out all right in the end. Didn't they?

Apparently not.

The smooth edges of her heart break under the weight of her tears, becoming sharp and jagged. She admits to herself that for most of this trip, she's been quietly hoping that life will somehow go back to the way they were, that she'll have a normal father again and marry a handsome prince. 

She casts those old dreams into the night, letting them float away like pieces of eggshell as her new self starts to form.

Her face is red and puffy when she climbs down in the morning, but her eyes are dry. "Good morning, Princess," says the huntsman, eyeing her cautiously. 

"Snowflower," she correct hims.

"What?"

"Snowflower. You can call me Snow, for short, but not Princess." Snow collects her gear, movements swift and businesslike. "Never Princess." He looks at her for a second, than bows his head in acquiescence.

She wakes up screaming from nightmares, although none of her dreams make her cry. She no longer has to hold her breath when skinning a corpse. She smiles when a bird sings, but she looks hungry instead of sorry to see a dead one. The huntsman tells himself not to mourn her old softness, but he does anyway.

A few days later, their luck runs out and Snow hears the sound of muffled curses in the woods as she sits watch by their dying fire. She's still shaking the huntsman awake when the bandits burst out of the trees. There are only three, but they are fast and hungry.

Two home in on the huntsman, the bigger and broader of the two travelers, while the third wrestles with Snow. The huntsman takes one down while another rams a spear through his chest, and dies with the gardener boy's name burbling on his lips.

Snow cries out as her companion falls; the third bandit seizes the opportunity to twist the knife out of her hands and grab a handful of her shorn hair. "Shhh, it's all right" he croons, spittle dripping onto her neck. "Be a good lad and this won't hurt a bit." His other hand digs beneath her jacket, only for his eyes to widen and his grip to go slack. "Holy shit, you're a--"

She seizes the advantage, grabbing the knife from his belt and plunging it through his eyeball and into his brain. Hot blood soaks her sleeve as he falls to the side, twitching and shuddering. 

She climbs to her feet and walks calmly over to the surviving bandit, riffling through the huntsman's things. Snow grabs him by the hair and yanks his head back, drawing her blade across his throat in one smooth motion.

Snow stands in a clearing painted crimson with blood, her ears ringing with death gurgles. She looks down at the dead man at her feet, but she sees her father's face instead. Against her will, her lips curve up into a smile.

Later on, she will bury the huntsman in a flowery grave, sobbing uncontrollably as the adrenaline rush gives way to grief for her friend. Later on, she will be shocked and horrified by her actions and feelings tonight. Later on she will pursue her quest with all the more vigor, desperate to reach a place where this kind of thing doesn't need to happen.

But for now, she feels invincible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on Snow White, but with elements of Mulan (the crossdressing and the homicide, plus I imagine Snow White to be ethnically Asian on her mother's side).


	2. Snow White, Blood Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Snow makes a new acquaintance and adjusts her parameters.

Snow doesn't sleep for a while. She tries, but every time she closes her eyes she hears branches cracking and hears the huntsman's death gurgles. When she can no longer walk straight and the black spots dancing across her vision have become a blizzard, she resigns herself to collapsing under the trunk of a tree. Her dreams are dark and quiet, for once.

When she awkwardly rolls out from her hiding spot the next morning (or maybe a few days have passed, she isn't sure) she is no longer alone.

“Hello,” says the red girl.

She is naked, except for the man’s jacket slung around her shoulders and the blood caking her skin. It crusts her hair, drips from the folds of her flesh, coats her lips like paint. Her blue eyes are like cracked glass. An axe hangs loosely from one hand, completely drenched.

“Hello,” says Snow, in the voice of one who has experienced too many disasters to really care anymore. “Did you come here from hell?”

The girl releases a musical laugh. “That’s funny! You’re funny. I like you.” She tosses the axe aside and drops down gracefully besides Snow, pulling her knees to her chin. “What are you doing here, funny girl?”

Snow sits up and stretches with a groan. “My father wants to fuck me, so I ran away,” she says. The words are broken glass in her throat, but she feels better when they’re out of her body. She looks over at the red girl. “How about you?”

The girl tells her story to a butterfly, perched on a blade glass. “I came here to get mushrooms and bring 'em back to Granny's house. That's where I live, you know. I've parents, but they didn't want me. Said I was simple, 'cause I don't like to be touched and I can't concentrate on what people are saying sometimes. Granny says that I'm not simple, I just see the world a different way. Said," she adds, and her face darkens.

Her voice shifts to a careful monotone. "The wolves came to our house. Wouldn't have been so bad, 'cept they were the two-legged sort, and those don't make any sense. Four-leggeds can be bad, but at least they respect walls. Didn't even have any females with them, not that that would have helped." Snow tenses besides her.

"They dragged Granny out of the house. Said she was a witch, been casting spells to make animals sick and drive people crazy, but all she did was brew medicines or help women get rid of babies they didn't need. I know, 'cause she was teaching me. She kept teaching me things even if they were times I couldn't focus, o'er and o'-over again, so I learned it real well.

"They burned her. Right in the middle of our garden, where all the new plants are coming up. All of our hard work, all of Granny's--Granny's..."

She looks down at herself, brushing crimson hands down her legs. Snow squints, and suddenly she can see the bruises visible under the blood. She can see the way that the red girl has pressed her feet together, carefully, in front of the place between her legs. She's not quite surprised at what comes next, but her blood still runs cold when the red girl says it. 

"They smacked me around, threw me onto Granny's bed. I told them, no wolves on Granny's bed, next thing you know they'll be dressing up in her things, but they didn't listen. It was strange, you know? Me--wolves like that will burn people alive, but they won't drink a ton or fuck around on their wives. At least, that's the idea. I guess the fire and screaming sort of...excited them. You know?

"They...ate me. Ripped me up with their cocks and swallowed me whole."

The silence hangs heavy, and Snow wants to throw up, but then the girl's voice brightens. "I got back at them, y'know. Crawled out of their bellies while they were all drunk and sleeping, stitched myself together, got Granny's good axe and chopped 'em all up. Stuffed the head wolf full of stones and tossed 'im in the river, I did."

She examines her nails. "I'm gonna hafta clean myself eventually, I suppose. Wouldn't want to get sick. But for now...it keeps me warm. I even smeared stuff on for the parts of me that weren't covered completely." Snow thinks her cheeks might be flushing under the blood. "I might've nibbled on a few of 'em, too. The way they nibbled on me." She sighs. "I don't think I'm right in the head. Not anymore."

The butterfly flies away, and Red waggles her fingers as it goes. "I made myself a poultice for my...wounds. I've slept in Granny's house, 'cause I didn't know where else to go. There's a still a bit of a mess--Granny'd be angry at that, but it's such a big mess I feel tired just looking at it. And then..." Her eyes twinkle. "Then I found a little girl in boy's clothes under a tree."

Snow leans back and looks up at the branches. Deep down, she knows that the smartest thing to do around this girl is run away as fast as possible. But then again, the smartest thing would have been to stay in her father's house, where her life would have been protected if not her body, rather than risk both in the wilderness. She looks into the other girl's broken-glass eyes and feels a bit of herself staring back.

Besides, she needs someone else to share watch with. And the red girl may be damaged, but her strength still takes Snow's breath away.

She sticks out her hand. "I'm Snowflower, but you can call me Snow." The red girl blinks at her for a few seconds, before extending her own hand for a tentative shake. Snow feels flakes of dried blood crumbling against her fingers, but she doesn't flinch, and her new companion relaxes. "What's your name?" Snow asks.

The other girl chews her bruised lip thoughtfully. "My parents had a name, but I don't like 'em, so I won't use. My Granny gave me a name, but I think if I say it I'll hear her screamin' at me while they burned her. You...you can call me Red. I like being Red." She moves her hands in a mock curtsy, and both girls giggle. 

Red smiles, showing a bloody hole from a missing tooth and a bit of pale flesh caught in her gums. “You’re funny, like Granny, and you don’t think I’m stupid. I think I like you,” she says.

"Well, I like you too, Red. May I come back to your home for tea?"

Red leads the way back to her Granny's house. They pass by a small pond, and Snow sees a man floating under the water, his hands bound and stones tied up in his preacher's robe. Fish swim in and out of his open, screaming mouth.

More men decorate the walls and floor of the cottage, flies buzzing across their open skin and glittering guts. Snow thinks there were five of them, but from the way they're all mixed together she's not sure. Most of the furniture lies in pieces, but the kitchen is surprisingly intact.

As Red mixes tea, Snow drums her fingers on the table. She doubts that her aunt would be jumping with joy at the idea of not one, but two companions. Still, her mother said that she had a generous heart--didn't she take in a little girl, Snow's cousin, when her birth parents didn't deserve her? Besides, the queen said that her sister has a big house and plenty of space, so Snow's sure they'll be able to make do.

They're sipping together when she broaches the question. "I'm going to a place where girls like us might be safe. Do you want to come with me?" She gestures at the cottage. "Like you said, it's quite a mess in here, and it's only going to get worse. Besides, the other villagers are probably going to come looking for their lost men soon." 

"I'll have to take a bath, won't I? And wear clothes?" she asks, winding her fingers through her hair. Under the bright blood it's still red, but a deeper, duller shade, like old roses. This depresses her until she remembers that roses have thorns.

Snow nods. "I'm afraid so."

Red sets down a cup and looks at her guest, from the tops of her short black hair to the toes of her worn leather boots. She studies at the bow slung down besides Snow's chair, the elegant way she holds herself, the way her green eyes study Red without judgement and fear. Those eyes remind Red a bit of her Grandma, but they also remind Red of herself. She knows that's not entirely a good thing, but it's better than the alternatives: eyes that look at her with fear or contempt or lust.

She brushes a fly off her shoulder. "I'll need to pack."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by Red Riding Hood, along with Snow White and Rose Red.


	3. Leave Not On A Carriage, But Your Own Two Feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a private conversation is overheard by exactly the right person.

There is a fine manor at the edge of a neat little town, where a rich merchant lives with his family. He has a daughter with rich brown skin and straight black hair, born from what everyone agrees of an ill-advised marriage with a forest woman.

After her mother died, her older and wiser father shunted the child off to the servant's quarters and got himself a far more suitable wife with two lovely white daughters. The brown-skinned girl was named Silver Bird, but her family called her Ashbitch.

Today, the girl is small and thin from years of hunger, but she is also strong with hard work. Her back is marked from beatings, but she also has callused knuckles from fighting off handsy boys. She would have liked to go live with her mother's tribe, but they were driven off the land long ago despite her mother's marriage.

She is not welcome in the servant's quarters, so she sleeps by the fire, repeating the magical stories her mother used to share with her. By now, she knows them so well that can recite them in both English and her mother's tongue, and has started adding tales of her own design to the repertoire.

There are old marks on her arm where her stepmother shoved her into the coals as a child. Sometimes the cracking of the flames will bring the bad memory back, so she digs her fingers into the hearth stones and imagine flying away--or gouging her stepmother's eyes out, whatever holds her together.

Three years ago, a fairy gave Silver Bird a beautiful dress and sent her to the ball in disguise. She tried so hard to be happy, but the magic powder to turn her skin pale left her itchy and nauseous, and the prince’s arrogant prattle made her feel lonelier than ever before.

When his men came hunting, the decision to smash her remaining slipper, dump the remaining powder down the drain, and hide in the attic nearly broke her in two. But she did it, and every day she prays to her mother's ghost that she made the right choice.

Now the stepsisters have been married off and she does not miss them. The stepmother, however, has become harsher than ever in the absence of her blood daughters, while Silver Bird's father clearly has no time for either of them. 

Her stepmother is trying to have another child, and seems convinced that it's Silver Bird's fault that nothing's working. "Witch!" she screams, and Silver Bird stays meekly at the ground, repeating stories in her head to drown out her fear and rage.

Silver Bird suspects that she's probably going to gotten rid of at some point or another, either through marriage to a clerk twice her age or the simpler path of the witch's stake. Perhaps she could leave by herself, but where would she go?

Tonight, her shoulder blades are still bleeding again and the air in the house is making her choke, until she can't just lie by the fire anymore. Silver Bird pulls on the old boy's clothes she wears to chop wood and slips a kitchen knife in her pocket for protection.

Her destination is the brook in the woods behind her father's house, a place she always goes to when it gets too much at night. She stands under the weeping willow, her mother's favorite thinking spot, somewhere they could perform the dances and songs of their people while trees screened them from ignorant eyes.

Not for the first time, Silver Bird contemplates the value of sliding under the water and breathing in until her pain goes away. She's wondering if she'll get to feel fish swimming up her nose before she dies when she hears voice.

There are two girls sitting on the bank, whispering to each other. One is carefully tending to her bow and arrows, the moonlight glinting on her shoulder-length black hair and cat-green eyes. The other lies curled up on her side under a hooded black cloak, trailing her fingers lazily through the waters. Silver Bird freezes, using skills learned lifetime of cowering out of sight to remain invisible.

"Does your aunt really live in a tower?" asks the hooded girl. "Why not a castle?"

Her companion shrugs. "She doesn't need a castle, 'cause she enchanted it to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It used to belong to some old lord before he died, so she grew some magic plants to hold it together. Then she replaced the stairs with these cool moving platforms so she wouldn't have to climb everywhere. In her letters to my--my mother, she said that it was kind of big for her and her daughter, but they liked the security from all those layers of stone."

The hooded girl seems to stiffen a little. "Her daughter? So she, she has a husband?"

"No," the archer soothes, and her friend relaxes. "Before she came to the tower, she lived next door to these people who didn't treat their little girl very well. She'd see her running around with bruises and hear them screaming at her, but she when told them to stop they just called her a witch and threatened to get her burned if she didn't shut up." "That's awful," said the hooded girl, shuddering. "What did she do?"

"Well she grew these really, really nice-smelling herbs that you could smell from the other yard--but only grownups could smell them. The girl's parents snuck into her yard one night to steal and eat them, but they were poisoned. After they were dead she went to get the little girl and they ran away together. My aunt named her Rapunzel."

The other girl giggles. "That's a really nice story, Snow. Do you have any others?"

Snow tells more magical stories about her aunt and her mother, about their childhood together and their adulthood apart. The girl in the cloak and Silver Bird both listen, transfixed. The conversation shifts to reminiscing about the lives these girls lived before they met up, along with some of the adventures they've had since then.

Hearing these girls talk, Silver Bird knows that the path they walk is a dark and dangerous one. She also knows that it's infinitely more hopeful than anything back at her father's house. The stories are as magical and uplifting as anything her mother ever told, with the added promise that she might be able to experience them for herself.

Then suddenly the girls are getting ready for bed, about to disappear into sleep where she can't reach them, and Silver Bird feels herself lurching out from under the willow tree. "Take me with you!" she cries before she can stop herself.

Instantly the black-haired girl has an arrow aimed at her heart, while her companion is clutching an axe Silver Bird didn't even see. They all stare at each other in silence for a second, eyes wide and hearts thumping.

"Please. I-I mean you no harm," Silver Bird whispers, raising her hands in the air. "I d-didn't mean to eavesdrop, I just, just..." She starts to hunch in on herself, shaking a little. For most of her life, when eyes burn into her skin the way these girls do now it means she's made a mistake and will have to suffer the consequences.

And then, a sudden wave of disgust at her own servile behavior rushes through Silver Bird. If she wanted to spend her whole life cowering, she'd have headed back home. She keeps her hands raised, but her back straightens and she lifts her chin. When she speaks, she puts enough concentration in each word to keep it from shaking.

"Everyone in my family treats me like shit, and the only person who've ever loved me is gone. If I stick around, I'll probably be dead or worse in a year. I'm not a tracker or anything, but I've got good stamina and I can handle myself in a fight. My mother showed me which plants are safe to eat. She named me Silver Bird."

They stare at each other in silence, and Silver Bird curses herself. The idea that these two girls, with their creamy skin and bright eyes, would ever accept her is a ridiculous. The chances someone who can look past her skin is probably one in a million, and Silver Bird's luck isn't nearly good enough for--

"My name's Red. Do you know any stories?" asked the hooded girl.

And thus things are settled. The three of them look at each and see the same things reflected: fear, pain, trauma, quietly boiling rage, slowly disintegrating shame, a deep appreciation for the power of stories to scare the dark thoughts away.

They go on together, and they find more reflections of themselves.


	4. The Mermaid And The Frog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our coterie begins to grow, as does the length of the chapters, and a bit of romance blossoms.

The map leads them south, through a thick tangle of swamps. Silver Bird and Red compare notes on their different experiences with herbs, eventually putting together a crude ointment that the girls can smear on their skin to keep out the flies. Snow hunts plentiful game, even landing a lucky shot through the eye of a crocodile. They hide in the bushes to avoid trouble when people pass by.

One day, they hear someone calling out from a well in the middle of the woods. There's sounds of scrabbling, a creative stream of curses, the hopeless pounding of fists against hard stone. The captive's voice is tight as they struggle not to cry.

When they peer in, the girls see a young person with bruises decorating their rich brown skin and black hair sticking in a dozen different directions, wearing clothes that were once fine before they were torn to pieces and drenched in mud. The prisoner shrinks away at the sight of them, hissing, "Go away! Go away and tell him that I don't care! I'll never be his prince again!"

"Shhh..." Silver Bird calls, leaning into the well. "It's okay. We were just passing by, no one sent us. Can we help you get out?"

Rescuing the not-prince is not an easy task, and one that they only work after some careful debate between each other and back-and-forth yelling into the well. Snow, the tallest, dangles her upper body over the edge of the well while the others maintain a tight grip on her jacket and legs. The not-prince picks their way up the mossy stone as far as they can go, before grabbing onto Snow's muscular wrists as she's hauled. There's some use of colorful language and acquiring of ugly scrapes, but finally the not-prince tumbles onto the grass and collapses, sobbing and shivering. For a while all they can do is sit with her until the relief of rescue and the trauma of her confinement die down, at least for now.

As they clean her wounds and help her warm up, the not-prince tells their story hesitantly, occasionally pausing with fear of judgment in their eyes. "I...for all my life I just ugly, wrong. Stuck and smothered, like, like a frog trapped in the mud. I mean, I like doing boyish things, like reading or sword fighting, but actually being a boy: walking like one, talking like one, fighting like one...loving like one...it like playing a role. Not being a boy is dangerous, I know, but for me being one was just so exhausting." She clears her thought. "And then, I figured it out. I wasn't a prince...I was a princess."

She gazes at the others, waiting for a reaction. Silver Bird doesn't stop dabbing at a particularly nasty bruise on her shoulder, Snow doesn't look up from the rabbit she's turning over a spit, and Red continues twisting blades of grass between her fingers (Red finds it easier to concentrate on what people are saying if she's doing something else at the same time).

Finally, Snow speaks. "What happened next?"

The well princess' eyes widen in shock at their calmness, but she collects herself enough to continue. "Well, I started trying to track down a sorcery who could help me with...this," she says, gesturing to her body. "That's how my father found out." Her face darkens. "He said I was cursed. Then he said I was mad. Then he said I was a perverted traitor, and threw me in-in there, until I agreed to be his son again. He'd send people to toss me food and dry blankets, before asking me to come home, to put my head back in that noose." Her voice trails off into silence.

"How long were you in there?" Snow asks quietly. She looks into the fire and imagines this girl's father burning there, along with her own father and Silver Bird's family and all the men at Red's house.

"I don't know. Less than a month. I--I wasn't quite right for a little while, down there." The princess looks down at her hands, shamefaced.

"Don't be sad," says Red, rolling over on her back. "I've been not-right, myself. It's not always fun, and you can't really wish it away."

"You know," Silver Bird says casually. "Snow has an aunt who might be able help you. She's a witch, and we're all going to see her." All eyes flick to Snow, who hesitates for just a second before relenting with a nod.

"Really?" the princess gasps out, before remembering herself and resuming a more distinguished tone. "I mean, you would not mind my presence?"

"I ate a bit of a man once, Silver Bird snores, and Snow hogs the blankets. There's really nothing you could do we haven't see before," Red says. The princess is wondering if she should say something about that first bit when Snow speaks up.  
"I do not 'hog' anything. I take precisely what I ne--"  
"A blanket-hogger and liar, then."  
"A challenge to my honor! How dare you!"

Silver Bird rolls her eyes as the other two girls bicker, but she smiles, and Silver Bird decides that the 'ate a man' thing doesn't matter so much. "So do you have a name, then?"

The princess thinks back to the long, miserable hours in the well, where there was nothing else to do except attempt the occasional escape and contemplate what a really meant to be a princess. She had considered and discarded plenty of new names, before finally coming upon one that seemed to fit. She had never said it aloud to anyone before, and worried about how it would feel on her tongue.

"Tiana," she said, and it felt perfect.

That night, when nightmares of the well made Tiana wake up screaming, there were three girls to hold her and whisper gently in her ear. And on other nights, when one of the her companions was wracked by her own demons, Tiana helped to comfort them in return.

They leave the swamps and make their way along the ocean shore, something that only Tiana has ever seen before. They spend a few happy days splashing happily in inlet coves, out of sight of the fisherman. They're walking along a curve in the shore, caught between grassy hills on one side and a placid grey sea on the other, when they find the mermaid.

Tiana is the first to see her: a tangle of thick red hair and mottled grey limbs that lies huddled in the shadow of a sandy rock, sobbing and muttering nonsensically. This being has the outline of a human, but the webbed fingers and toes of something from the deep. The four girls approach with caution; Snow notches her bow, but keeps it lowered.

"Hello?" Tiana asks. The stranger sits up with a gasp and twists around to look at them, revealing a smoothly muscled body balanced on a graceful line between male and female. The bluest, brightest eyes she had ever seen pin Tiana in place. There are bruises adorning the mermaid's soft cheek and delicate throat, the sight of which made Tiana's blood boil in a way she had never experienced. A pair of pearly pink lips ask "Who are you?" in a rich, musical voice that seems to echo the rushing waves beside them.

Tiana's brain stops working. "I...uh, we..." she stutters. The stranger's eyes dart around, absorbing the size of the group, before they dart away with a panicked squeak. Or try to--the mermaid's barely taken a step before they collapse to the ground with a heart wrenching cry of pain. They don't seem visibly injured, but there's something strange and menacing about the way that light reflects off her bare feet, an unnatural glitter. Even if they have never encountered in before, all four girls know enchantment when they see it.

There was a beat of awkward silence, as everyone quietly wonders what the hell they're supposed to do next. Then they hear men's voices echoing around the curve of the shoreline, accompanied by the clank of weapons and the rustle of starched uniforms. Soldiers.

"We need to go," Snow whispers. "We can't just leave them," mutters Silver Bird, as she and Red go for their weapons.

Tiana isn't listening to them. She's already dropped to her knees a safe distance away from the beached mermaid, extending her arms in what she hopes is a non-threatening manner. "Please, let us help you," she whispers, her words tense and quick. "I know what it's like to be thrown away. We all do, one way or another. I can carry you, and we will do everything in our power to keep you safe, but you have to please trust us. We mean you no harm, I swear on my life and my immortal soul."

The stranger stares blankly at her, and Tiana was wonders if she'd been understood when two grey arms wrap around her shoulders, clinging tight. Tiana's body is strong from years of boyish exercise, and she's able to carry her charge over the hill with ease, the others on their heels. They bury themselves in a thick hillock of grass and hold their breaths, hearts pounding so hard it hurt. Maybe the men aren't a threat, but they're all running from something, and if they could all stumble upon each other than one of the Somethings might stumble upon them.

Tiana rubs the mermaid's quaking back and ignores the way their skin gently ripples, the softness of that red hair, the sweet tingle of a delicate mouth pressed into her chest...fuck.

The voices of men passing behind them interrupt her awkward thoughts. "His highness said he found the thing somewhere around 'ere," says one. "If it don't show up in the next mile or so, than it probably swam home or got eaten by sumptin'."

"What exactly do they want to do with it?" asks another, younger voice. "Fred said that the priests wanna burn it as a demon, but Neal said that the king's gonna put it in a zoo."

"Zoo, most likely," a third voice pipes up. "It'll go in with the three-tailed cat and that freaky monkey with the tattoos. I'll bet his majesty was spittin' mad the prince didn't think to bring it back to the palace with him."

"Did you hear that it actually wanted to fuck him?" asks a fourth voice. Tiana felt the mermaid tense in her arms, and looked down to see tears trickling from those shining eyes. The sight wrenched her heart more than it should have.

After the men had vanished, talking and laughing, into the distance, the girls wait a long time before standing up. When they resume walking, Tiana is still carrying the mermaid in her arms. No one comments on it, and the mermaid makes no attempt to escape.

Their story spills out in bits and pieces over the next few hours: the story of a creature from under the sea, where gender was a weird and meaningless concept, falling in love with a beautiful face she/he glimpsed on the deck of a ship. The deal with the witch, the agonizing transformation, getting resigned to feet that would never walk without agonizing pain. And finally, the discovery that what is beautiful in one culture is hideous in another, especially when you are dealing with a prince who very much prefers girls that are completely girls, and has no interesting in letting a mistaken mermaid down gently. His rejection was as violent as it was final.

When they finally stop, the mermaid dives back into the waves and tries to hold their breath for as long as they can, only to emerge shrieking in rage and frustration. They do it over and over again until Tiana finally grabs them and holds them in her arms, pleading with the mermaid to stop, please stop. "I can't stand you hurting yourself," she whispered in the mermaid's ear, and they looked up at Tiana in wonder and slowly reawakening hope.

The next day, the mermaid gives them their name. It's not the kind of the name you could say without plenty of practice, so they generously agree to let the girls call them Ariel. "I found it on a piece of a dead ship," they explain. Everyone thought it was a lovely name.

When Snow mentioned the tower, Ariel wasn't keen on trusting a witch again, but where else could she go? Besides, she felt safe in Tiana's arms, and none of these humans seemed to treat her with the disgust of the prince or the suffocating awe she would have gotten from his father.

Carrying Ariel each day is tiring, but Tiana never complains. Nor does Ariel mind tracing their fingers along with Tiana's rich dark skin, gazing into her endlessly expressive eyes, or weaving new patterns in Tiana's kinky black hair as it grows longer and longer. Ariel joins the girls in their sharing of stories, songs, jokes, and comfort, but her connection with Tiana is a special one. They whisper deep secrets and sweet nothings in each other's ears while the other girls sleep, bodies curving together like a key into a lock.

When they finally kiss, Ariel thinks that Tiana's lips taste of rose petals and woodsmoke. Tiana thinks that Ariel's lips taste of sea salt and sunlight.


	5. Hymn To The Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some people are left more battered by the ends of their fairy tales than others.

Once upon a time, a girl was cursed by a witch, pricked her finger on a spindle, and fell into a deep sleep. She woke up screaming in the throes of childbirth, her legs still bruised and bloody from her mysterious visitor nine months earlier. She kept screaming long after the birth, until her babies, shriveled and weak from only having the bitter fruits of magic to feed on in her womb, died. Then she stopped screaming and was silent.

Her people weren't sure what do with this inconvenient, defiled princess. They decided to leave her in the woods with the bodies of her children, the thorns and skulls scraped off the castle walls piled around them in a kind of nest. She sat there for an hour or a day or a century, not moving except to relieve herself or occasionally picking some berries to eat. She did not speak, but everyone once in a while she would sing. That's how they found her, by following her singing.

She gazed calmly up at the faces gathered around her, rotting babies held loosely in her lap. At first she had been a little frightened by their men's clothes and glinting weaponry, but they stayed out of her personal space and there was no lust or condemnation in their eyes. Their cries of horror and outrage echoed dully in her ears as she hummed a lullaby, trying to soothe them.

The silent girl wouldn't let them clean her off, but she was willing to scrub herself after they gently lowered her into a river. She didn't mind when they took away her babies and buried them, especially since they picked pretty flowers for the two little graves. They pulled a jacket over her shoulders and tied two others around her waist until they could steal some clothes for her (along with the mermaid, because on them was carrying a very nice mermaid) from a nearby village.

The silent girl liked these strangers, liked their rainbow of skin tones, voices, and shapes. She liked the way one or another of them was always holding her hand as they walked along together.

They tried repeatedly to get her to talk, but all of the words had been ripped out of her along with her virginity and her children. This made her sad, and she expected that they felt the same. But she was still able to sing, and she did it frequently on her walks. They liked her voice so much that the redhead in the cloak named her Nightingale (despite the others saying "you can't name her, she's not a dog") and the silent one took to her new title with relish.

It was going to happen eventually, Snow knew. Even with their increased numbers, even with their weapons and watches, someone would attack them the way the bandits. She knew it was a mistake to keep picking up strays, forming such a big, obvious group. If she left the others behind she would be safer--but than the transformation that had begun after the death of her mother and her huntsman would be complete, and she'd become something unrecognizable. She would not dishonor her ghosts in such a way.

So she waited and worried, and when the bandits once again exploded out of the trees it was almost a relief.

The men had prepared for a fight. They weren't prepared for the way Snow's eyes went cold and hard as she notched and fired in one fluid, endlessly practiced motion. They weren't prepared for Red, cackling and howling like a wild thing behind the twirling blade of her axe. They weren't prepared for Silver Bird punching with one hand and stabbing with another, lost in the memory of her stepmother's cruel hands and her skin burning, her mind buzzing with an endless traumatized scream of protest.

They weren't prepared for Ariel to twisted around from her seated position and sink razor-sharp, retractable claws and teeth into the legs of anyone who got too close. They weren't prepared for Tiana to yank a sword from one of their own and charge into battle, blade flashing with years of training by a master swordsman. They weren't prepared to die quickly and brutally, leaving behind only a scattering of scratches and cuts to mark the passing.

The battle only lasted a few minutes, although it would feel much longer in their memories. Now everyone and everything was splattered brightest red, like an abattoir or a rose garden. Entrails slithered across the ground like dying snakes, propelled by movements of still-twitching bodies. The firelight played gently over the bodies of the dead and the stunned faces of the survivors.

Ariel threw up, spitting frantically to get the last yucky bits of human out of her body. Tiana stared at the sword in her shaking hand, taking deep, slow breaths in an effort not to pass out. Red tore off her cloak and rocked back and forth, hugging herself as she giggle hysterically. Silver Bird fell to her hands and knees, frantically murmuring a prayer to her mother and the ancestors in her head. She wasn't sure what she was praying for--to ask forgiveness? Gratitude for survival? Begging for the chattering in her teeth to stop? Praying that her battle-madness would never come again, or hoping that it would?

Snow was more experienced in these matters, so she was a bit more composed as ripped an arrow out a man's forehead and tried her best to drown out the rising tide of deja vu. This time, at least, none of the men had touched her and no one had been seriously hu--wait.

"Where's Nightingale?"

Nightingale hadn't stayed. How could she, after much trouble staying still had gotten her in before? Snow had told them this could happen, everyone had said the important thing would be to stand their ground, but then the strangers had burst into their perfect little world and none of it mattered before the danger hadn't stopped, and she was screaming again in her head.

She stood trembling, back pressed up against a tree, as the other girls called her name. "Nightingale?" said Tiana, trying not to let her voice shake. "Come on, sweetie, it's alright. They're all dead. They can't hurt you anymore."

Nightingale wanted to stand up and go back to her friends, but her friends weren't safe so she wanted to sit down, and she compromised by falling over with a soft squeak. Their heads all whipped in her direction; someone took a step towards her and she scrabbled backward.

Red held up a hand. "Wait." Even stark naked and holding a bloody axe (again), she managed to look composed enough for everyone to stop and look at her. The moment hung, stretched; the drip of someone's blood sounded impossible loud.

And then Red began to sing. It was a simple ditty about the memorization of certain herbs and animals, one that had been passed down from her grandmother and her grandmother before her. She cycled through it once, twice, before Tiana joined with a ribald old drinking song she'd learned from her father's men.

Silver Bird joined in with a low chant to the spirits that her mother had taught her, and Snow started crooning a romantic ballad she'd heard sung during her mother's balls. Finally, Wave opened her mouth to unleash a stream of rustles, clicks, chirps, and groans that were as incomprehensible to the others as they were beautiful.

It al sounded terrible, of course. Too many styles, too many tunes, not to mention that some of them were not exactly great singers. But that soothed Nightingale all the more, because people can only sing that badly when they feel like everything is all right.

She stepped out of the trees with her own song, one that she'd heard sung by bards while announcing tales of great adventure. Her voice rose above the rest, clear and strong.

They packed, still singing. Snow started stripping the dead men of their provisions, and to her surprise Nightingale came over to help. Than they lit torches from the ashes and headed off into the night, to find a resting place that wasn't covered in corpses.


	6. Ashes, Ashes, We All Rise Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the size of our little band increases by one, or two depending on your perspective.

"No," Gretel says, folding her arms and screwing up her face in an expression carefully designed to convey impending doom.

Hansel is not impressed. "So what's the plan? Leave them down there forever?" The cellar door bumps and rattles under their feet, accompanied by muffled yells and weapons clanging against its iron undersides. Gretel has spent enough time breaking her nails against that cold metal surface, screaming her brother's name until her voice was hoarse, to know that no one was getting out of the cellar until she wanted them to.

"If I have to. Or would you rather I risk them turning out like the witch?" Gretel thrusts a hand at the cage slumped in the corner, its black bars twisted and melted into an insane spiderweb. She immediately feels guilty for bringing up her brother's confinement, but he just rolls his eyes and presses on.

"We hid behind the wall and watched for hours last night. If you thought they were like the witch, you would have dropped a burning log down there already. So what are you waiting for?" He's wearing that innocently logical expression he'd use to make her do his chores back home, and Gretel flares up at the sight. "I have been watching them, and so far I find their behavior deplorable. They invaded private property--"

"Private property? This place looks like a mass grave for gingerbread men, and you know it." Hansel gestures at the heaps of blackened sugar surrounding them, the liquified and re-frozen chocolate filling in the cracks of the stone foundation. After the blaze escaped the oven, it consumed the roof and most of the walls. Four months after it happened, Gretel still swears she can sometime smell burnt candy in the air.

She shakes off the memories and focuses on not being persuaded by her idiot older brother. "But it's our home--"

"That's highly debatable, but more to the point we weren't even there, remember?" Gretel looks down at her feet, face flushing. She remembers: they'd gone to pick berries, only for her to remember the first time their parents had led them into the woods to die, and everything that happened after. Gretel had collapsed to the ground under the weight of the fear and abandonment and anger while Hansel murmured gently in her ear, waiting patiently for her to return.

Hansel must be remembering, too, because his face softens. "I'm not saying that you did something wrong, but they wouldn't have known you were there. And instead of letting them go in the morning, or chasing them away, or even talking to them like a normal person, you waited for them to go in the root cellar before locking them up. Why is that, do you think?"

Gretel looks down at the worn toes of her boots. "So I should just follow them to the Mushroom Kingdom or wherever the fuck those loonies think they're going?" she asks, wishing she could put more venom behind her words. Her voice drops, so low her brother shouldn't be able to hear it. "I don't need them. I've got you."

Her brother chuckles grimly. "You don't believe that. Look at me, Gretel."

She doesn't want to look up. She doesn't want to acknowledge it. Her brother's precisely so she doesn't have to.

"Gretel," and she looks up because she could never resist her big brother for long.

There's a bright red mark on Hansel's throat where none was visible before. It's so small, nothing compared to the mass of crimson that spilled from under his chin the day he died, but it's enough. The witch crawled out of the oven while Gretel was setting him free, and she landed a lucky shot on his neck before Gretel could beat her back in with a fire poker. He bled in out her arms as they huddled outside the cottage and watched the place burn together, the flames reflected in his glassy eyes. It was quick, if nothing else.

The eyes of the ghost, or hallucination--she's never sure what she wants to believe--are serious. "You can't stay here, Gretel. You're running out of the witch's supplies, and you haven't figured out her book of spells--"

"I have too," Gretel mutters. Sometimes she feels guilty for teaching herself the witch's magic, but she can't think of any better way to stick it to that filthy old hag than using her power for her own ends.

Hansel sighs. "You can blow up lease with your mind and turn squirrels blue, which is amazing and all, but you haven't found any instructions for making the garden grow or turning rocks to gold. We both know that going back isn't an option, not that those two miserable fuckers would let you in. If you haven't already killed yourself out of wildly misplaced guilt for 'not saving me,' whatever the hell that means, then you're not going to."

Gretel swallows and rubs her right wrist. She sliced it open not long after the fire, only to bind her wound if only so Hansel would stop screaming in her ear. The scar it left behind is hideous, but she feels that the burns on her face are worse. Hansel says that they make her more interesting. He always was ridiculously optimist. Even after the witch locked him up he'd still whispered to her while she scrubbed the floors, making stupid jokes and talking about all the places they'd go when he was free.

"They'd never take me in a million years," she tells him harshly, wishing he wouldn't make her say it out loud. "I'm hideous, I have just enough magic to be terrifying, and I'm batshit insane. I'll slip up and talk to you in front of them, and then they'll probably want to me out of my misery out of kindness. Or just laugh."

"Gretel," Hansel placing a hand on her shoulder. She knows it's just a memory, but she leans into the feeling anyway. "Last night, you saw one of those girls trying to sew padded cups into a jacket so she wouldn't look as much like a man while another literally chewed up tree branches into more manageable pieces with her teeth. They had an argument about how long a man can go after his head's chopped off, and whether that's longer than a chicken. When the moon rose, the one in the hood actually howled. And when one of them woke up screaming from a nightmare about being thrown in a well by her father, they gathered around her until it was over and made sure she was okay afterwards.

"If you explain yourself and apologize for being such a rude host, you'll at least give them a chance to understand. And, if not..." Hansel smirks. "You'll just dispose of them. You're very good at disposing of people, Gretel."

She stares at him for a few seconds, before saying "How come you were never this supportive when you were live?" Once again, she immediately regrets what she said, and once again Hansel takes it in stride.

"I only got like this when you really need me to, and you rarely do," he says with a smile. "You're stronger than you know, Gretel."

When Gretel slowly levers up the door and calls into the root cellar "Hello? Please don't shoot me. My name is Gretel, and I think we've gotten off on the wrong foot," she feels her brother standing tall at her side, driving her fears away the ways he always has.

A week or so later, Gretel is running for her life and cursing Hansel's name for thinking this was a good idea.

"Fuck!" she screams as they scramble up a tree, the wolves' teeth literally gnashing at their heels. If there hadn't been so much space between them and the pack when they were first smelled out, they'd all already be dead.

Red hangs upside down from a branch like a tabby strung out on catnip, howling with laughter. "Can't catch me, chickadee! Four-legged wolves are dumber 'n two-leggeds, and two-leggeds are dumber n' dirt!" One hand lets go of the branch to snatch her axe from her belt and slice it through the largest wolves' cranium, sending the beast crashing back to earth with a dying howl. "Poor four-leggeds," Red croons, sounding genuinely sad.

"Fucking lunatic," Gretel mutters, clinging to the trunk with white knuckles as howls and snarls rise up from below. "You're one to talk," Hansel says, swinging his legs from the branch besides her. "Shut the fuck up, this is all your fault," she hisses.

On the other side of the trunk, Silver Bird seems more focused on getting into a comfortable position than the wolves or Red's apparent death wish. "How are you so calm?" Gretel demands. "You're trapped in a tree with two lunatics!"

"Logic would suggest that she herself is a lunatic and that's why she's calm," Hansel says. Gretel sticks out her tongue at him

Silver Bird shrugs, casually glancing down as Red starts yipping and growling back at the wolves. "Gift of adrenaline, I suppose. I usually wait until after the crisis is over to have my freakouts." She sighs. "Besides, nothing out here has scared me as badly as my stepmother and stepsisters did."

Gretel shifts uncomfortably, the burns on her face tingling. "I'm sorry," she mutters. Silver Bird twists around at a precarious angle to give her a smile, and Gretel feels her flutter a little at the sight.

"You should tell her how pretty her hair looks when it catches the sun," Hansel chimes in. Gretel rips pieces of bark from the tree and throws them at his head, grateful that Silver Bird can't see her blushing furiously.

They stay in the tree together, just talking, until the others show up to save them. On the way down, Silver Bird slips and falls into Gretel's arm with a high-pitched shriek; they hold each other for a long before Gretel carefully lowers her to the ground. And Gretel admits to herself that maybe, just maybe, her bastard dead brother had the right idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might not add anything for a few days, because I'm going to be busy on schoolwork, but I will definitely resume posting by Friday. This is my first fic, and I'm pleasantly surprised that people who aren't related to me are interested in it.


	7. One Thousand And One Is Never Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we indulge in some switching between past and present, because no one is paying me for this and I can do what I want. Much love. Also, the chapter length is increased a little: I haven't yet decided if we'll go back to a shorter length next installment or not.

The arms of the girl with the bow are shaking slightly; not from terror, but from the strain of keeping it drawn. She peers at Nnedi down the shaft of her arrow, eyes narrowed like she recognizes her from somewhere.

For her part, the stolen scythe in Nnedi's hands is definitely quivering out of fear. She's glad Ade can't see it from where their backs together. This isn't her first time in a fight, but it's the first time she's been trapped in a ring of girls with glinting blades and stone cold eyes. The fact that some many different weapons and backgrounds have been united against them just makes it scarier. Not to mention that the redhead lying on the ground appears to be spitting knives out of their mouth.

As they wait to live or die, Nnedi admits to herself that she and Ade are really shitty thieves.

From a distance, Nnedi's feet are a soft, smooth inky black. Up close, they're tough and callused from from a near decade of painfully enforced lessons and grueling dance recitals. She's recently discovered that she can fracture a man's ribs with a well-aimed kick, or run for miles, barefoot, with her beloved in her arms.

Nnedi was nine when she came came to the sultan's palace, still clutching a bloody lock of hair that she'd pulled from her twin sister's head as the slavers yanked them apart. That lock of hair would remain tucked in her pocket or wrapped around her wrist every day for the rest of her life.

She was introduced to her eleven new 'sisters,' a collection of girls drawn from across the globe amassed to perform for the sultan's entertainment. Or, more specifically, at his weddings. His many, many weddings to beautiful girls who never lasted the next day.

By the time she was seventeen, Nnedi had grown used to tracking blood across the floor after a painfully hard and fast recitation. She'd resigned to the fact that eventually her body wouldn't 't be able to bear the strain of dancing anymore, and she be trucked off to a brothel, like so many of her older 'sisters' already had been. Her parents were gone, her village was in ashes, and she didn't have a hope in hell of ever seeing her sister again. What did she have to fight for?

And then she saw Scheherazade.

At first, the other girl was just another future corpse politely watching the wedding dance at her husband's side, wrapped up tight in opulent finery as if already prepared for the grave. She was attractive enough, but she wasn't a heart stopping beauty the way that some of the others had been. Nnedi had trained herself not to look closely at the sultan's brides; this one shouldn't have been a blip on her radar.

But there she didn't look at Nnedi's dark skin and inky dreadlocks with contempt or disinterest, the way so many people in the palace did. Her eyes were fixed on the dance like it was the most interesting thing she'd ever seen, even more interesting than the bejeweled predator at her side.

(Scheherazade had later told Nnedi that she had been making up stories about the dancers and where they might have come from. From her noble profile and the grace of her movements, she'd thought Nnedi was the captured daughter of a king.)

It had only taken a few brief glances of those eyes to throw Nnedi off a step, earning her a few smacks of the rod later on. She didn't begrudge the king's new wife, though. In fact, she actually found herself a little sad that that the new princess would be strangled by dawn tomorrow, her corpse discreetly hauled out of the royal bedchamber and disposed of by some unlucky servants.

So imagine her surprise when Nnedi found Schehezerade kneeling besides one of the palace's many fountains the next mornings, frantically gulping water as she shook with a mix of shock and exhaustion. She glanced up at Nnedi, eyes wild, and stammered something. It sounded like "I couldn't stay in there any longer," but her voice was so hoarse that Nnedi couldn't be certain. 

Schehezerade tried to stand up too fast, only to fall backward with a groan. Nnedi leapt forward and grabbed her right before her head hit the ground; the other girl was shocking light and her ribcage vibrated like a hummingbird's. "Easy," Nnedi muttered, helping Schehezerade to a nearby bench and trying to ignore how her own heart pounded.

She laid Schehezerade down and tried to make her as comfortable as possible, casting glances over her shoulder to see if there were any guards coming. A few of the wives had tried to escape their fate, but none of them had made it very far, and she couldn't image any of them stopping for water. Nnedi looked down at Schehezerade, still conscious, but barely. The wisest course of action would be to go fetch help, but she couldn't make herself stand up. The king's wife just looked so small and battered, so painfully familiar in her vulnerability.

Schehezerade made the decision for her when she latched on to Nnedi's wrist with an iron hand, eyes still closed. "Don't leave," she murmured. "Please"

Nnedi didn't. She stayed there long after Schehezerade fell asleep, until it was time for her daily dance rehearsal. When she came back, Schehezerade was gone, and Nnedi wondered if she'd really been there, or if she'd been helping a ghost.

"Let's all remain calm," Ade says suddenly. She speaks English with an accent, having taught herself from listening to traders. Nnedi has been learning from as best as she can, and understands well enough what Ade's said just enough to lack hysterically at the possibility...until Ade drops her knives and raises her hands in the air.

Nnedi is so shocked by the sound of metal clattering on dirt that she drops her own weapon, cursing herself immediately afterwards. The girls all look as surprised as she feels.

That's Scheherazade for you. Grabbing people's attention, shocking them out of their wits, comes as naturally to her as breathing. It was usually something Nnedi admired, but if she got out of this alive she might just kill Ade herself.

Well, they're probably going to die now anyway. Nnedi wonders about the spirits they'll meet on the other side, and what the ghosts of her family will think of who she's become.

When she came back the next day, Nnedi found Schehezerade kneeling at the fountain again, and they repeated the same routine. But this time, when she came back later, she found the other girl sitting daintily on the bench, hidden behind a veil. No guards or servants in sight, and why would there be? The protocols for looking after a royal wife after the wedding night had been neglected for so long they were practically forgotten.

Schehezerade looked up, those dark eyes flashing with welcome. "Come, sit." Her voice was still a little hoarse, but better than it had been this morning. She patted the bench next to her with a smile. Nnedi hesitated: they may both be prisoners, but the dusky-skinned girl was still technically her superior.

"You've seen me drool and drink water straight from the fountain by this point. If anyone should be nervous, it's me." Schehezerade pointed out, raising a delicate eyebrow. She was right, so Nnedi sat down, although she still feels uncomfortably bare in her thin, sweaty dancing skirt.

They sat in silence for a few moments, before Schehezerade spoke again. "Go on. Ask."

Protocol was probably in ashes at this point, so Nnedi did. "How are you not dead?" She was sure what she was expect to hear, but it wasn't what Schehezerade said: "Stories."

"Seriously?" Nnedi couldn't stop herself from barking out a laugh, only to shoot a nervous look at Schehezerade for fear of offending her.

But the king's wife's voice was full of humor as she replied, "Exactly. I used to make up stories for myself and my sisters, and I thought it'd be a wasted opportunity to not pass one on to His Exaltedness before..." her breath catches, but she forges on. "And then he couldn't stop listening, and I didn't dare stop talking. When morning came I was in the middle of a story, so he said he'd let me live another night, and then...I did the same thing last night."

Nnedi wanted to ask about the stories Schehezerade had told, but she remembered how exhausted the other girl had looked this morning and the last. Telling tales all night long must be exhausting as an endless cycle of performances.

"Well, you've really thrown everyone for a loop," she said instead. "There aren't any weddings planned for the neat future, and the instructors are at a loss--that's all we're here for, really. The other girls have all been whispering about the exotic sex or magic spells you've been doing to keep the sultan happy. Adeela thinks you made some kind of a deal with a jiin, and Olga thinks you're a of demon is disguise."

Schehezerade laughed, and although men will one day tell tales about her speaking voice it's her laugh that Nnedi really loves, because it's so rare and fierce. "A demon! That's nice. I would love to be a demon." She blinked, studying Nnedi. "What's your name?"

Nnedi told her, and they spent another hour sitting there together, just talking about meaningless things. The next day, Nnedi came out to the fountain and sat with Scheherazade again, helping her drink. The day after that, she was already when Schehezerade came stumbling out. And the next day, and the next.

Ade's still talking. "We mean you no harm. We underestimated your strength, and the amount of resources you had to spare," she says, her words smooth and calm as a river. "We humbly apologize for any insult or fear we might have caused, and we would gratefully appreciate if you could go on your way."

The girl in the hood breaks out into laughter, twirling the axe at her side. If she wasn't so focused on not shitting herself Nnedi might laugh, too. This isn't the sultan's bedroom; Ade can't use those wonderful of hers to stop them from being slaughtered, anymore than words could save Nnedi from a whipping.

So she's even more surprised when the hooded girl stops laughing and cocks her head at them, saying, "You're not like the other bandits, are you?" She lowers the axe and steps forward, eyes wide and curious. "Who are you?" 

"Red," one of the others warns, but the hooded girl doesn't listen. She looks at them up and down, as if searching for something. Her eyes are bright green, wild in a way Nnedi has never seen before and yet finds familiar nonetheless.

"You're strange things," she says. "I know, because I'm a strange thing, too, and so are my friends." She plops down on the grass, sitting crosslegged in front of distance of Nnedi's scythe, and looks up at them with a childlike expression of wonder. "How did you find us, strange things?"

Nnedi doesn't remember when her conversations with Schehezerade stopped being a means of whiling away the hours with someone whose very survival was a curiosity, and became something more intimate. She only knew that when she traded Schehezerade lengthy named for the more familiar Ade, it felt natural. It felt natural when they started comparing stories about each other's childhood: Nnedi spoke about her life in the village, and Ade revealed that her father was a small-time merchant who'd sought to increase his status by selling her to the king

And when they broke down in each other's arms, sobbing about the loved ones they'd lost and the people who'd hurt them in waves of pure fury and rage, it felt equally natural.

Dances resumed, although the exhausting wedding performances had been traded for simpler, less frequent evening entertainments. When Nnedi danced, she danced not for the sultan, but for the beautiful woman at his side, and she moved with a grace and joy she had never associated with dancing before.

She was beaten or starved a few times for being late to lessons, and every time was worth it. Her adopted sisters teased her for her disappearances, joking that she had fallen for a eunuch, but no one tattled on her or seriously tried to ferret out the truth, and for that she was grateful. A few of the others of troupe had had affairs with palace servants or slaves, although Nnedi doubted that anyone was venturing into territory as dangerous as she.

It wasn't an affair, of course. Not until the day that Nnedi saw Ade holding back tears, trying not to wonder if her mother and sisters knew that she was alive, and suddenly wanted to stop those tears by any means possible. When she leaned forward, the lips she met were sweet and acquiescing, and Nnedi finally understood why so many courtiers thrived off of sappy love poetry.

Even more special than the kiss was the day that Ade gave her a story: special because it hadn't been wrenched from her through or hastily added on to in the spur of the moment. It was the story of a young mother searching for her lost son, only to end up navigating a dreamlike world above the clouds in a boat made of living color. There were jokes that made Nnedi giggle, sexual language to make her blush, and plenty of curses that Ade had heard used by her family's servants. It was the kind of story the sultan would never hear.

The triumphant ending made Nnedi happy, until she realized that Ade hadn't been able to push the tale to its full potential; her focus had to be on keeping straight the stories she would give the sultan tonight. More chilling was the possibility that she had keep the story confined to a single afternoon, because she might not be alive tomorrow to tell it.

It's hard, falling for with a girl whose head is perpetually on the chopping block. It's even harder to be the girl on that block, because as Nnedi's lot in life was getting a little easier, Ade's was growing worse. She'd confessed to Nnedi that she'd first started leaving the king's bedchamber after he left for his daily activities because she could feel the ghosts of all his wives pressing down on her, suffocating her. As time passed, those ghosts would follow her outside, haunting her dreams and robbing her of precious sleep.

This wasn't good; talking nonstop throughout the night was already putting a bad strain on Ade's health. She was finding it harder to string sentences together, harder to make the story interesting...harder to come with new ideas. They both knew that Ade would only have so many stories to tell at this rate, and then...

"He loves me," Ade said once, thoughtfully stroking Nnedi's hair as the dancer's head lay in her lap. "He says he's fallen for me, that he wants me to have his child." She sighed, glancing up a passing bird. "And I can never bring myself to ask, what happens you have an heir? Will you still love me then, when I'm fat and tired and sick of being locked up with your other victims?"

Nnedi didn't say anything, because there was nothing to be said. All it took was one stretch of boredom, one burst of paranoia. The sultan might discover Ade's affair with Nnedi, or (more likely, considering his possessive nature and the betrayal of his first wife) convince himself that she had a male lover. Ade was living on a ticking clock, and so was Nnedi, because their hearts were bound together with an unbreakable cord.

She started having nightmares about arriving at the fountain and finding no one there, even after she waited for hours. The third time she woke up, sweating and shaking, Nnedi started to think seriously about running away.

It was stupid, of course. Even if they escaped, the world outside the palace would no doubt tear them to pieces. Defying the sultan was suicide, and her sisters might all pay the price for her disobedience. Nnedi's life could be hard, but it wasn't in danger like Ade's was. The smart thing to do would to be walk away while she still could.

Except...except death was already an old friend of hers, ever since the slavers had come to their village. Except that being a slave meant dying a million small deaths before the last one. Except that with every day she felt lonelier and lonelier around her sisters, because as good-hearted as some of them were none of them were Ade. Except that Ade had skin like velvet, and a mind that buzzed like lightning.

Except that the idea of being a heroine in her own, real-life adventure story was the most intoxicating and terrifying thing Nnedi could imagine.

"We saw you in the town, back that way," Ade explains. She feels Nnedi take a slow breath from where their spines touch, probably fighting the urge to yell at her. You don't just admit to stalking the people who are ready to kill you, after all. It was basic logic. But these people, especially the hooded girl on the ground, don't seem very interested in logic, so Ade tries for honesty instead.

She carefully gestures at the black-haired archer and the small, brown-skinned girl at her side. "You two were at the general store. I don't think you saw us--Nnedi here dresses up as a man sometimes, and I was under my clock. You were outsiders, like us, so you attracted my attention, and you seemed to be able to spend a lot of money." The two girls glance at their feet, looking embarrassed at their lapse.

"We thought you were traders of some kind. We didn't want to pick a fight, so we followed you back to your camp. We've been trying out hand at burglary--nothing much, just enough to keep us going. We don't like leaving bodies, it attracts attention." The sultan's jewels hadn't lasted forever, especially since they had to lie about their origins and pry some of them out of recognizable casings.

"We didn't see your...watchman," Ade says, glancing at the mottled being lying propped up against a tree, almost blending into the flickering firelight. S/he smiles, bearing sharp fangs, and Ade orders herself not to flinch. 

"If you let us, we will give you all the valuables in our possession and depart with our apologies" she says, ignoring how Nnedi instinctively tenses at the thought of giving up their things. At least they'll get out of here alive.

There's a silence as the group seems to consider her proposition, and the hooded girl--Red--says the one thing Ade never expected. "That's not what I asked. I asked, who are you? Where are you from, strange little thieves? What is your story?"

Ade didn't mind when Nnedi proposed flight. It was probably doomed to fail, but she'd much prefer to die fighting on her feet than strangled on her knees byy her husband's men.

They started caching supplies in one of their secret meeting places; Ade stole food from dinner and wheedled water skins from her husband, claiming it's better tasting than wine and more convenient than the fountain. They went through plans, mixing Nnedi's practical sense of choreography with Ade's desperate imagination to create something that just might work. Nnedi steeled herself to start flirting with a particular stable boy in her spare time, leaving Ade quivering with simultaneous anxiety and jealousy.

They rode out intense waves of fear and self-doubt in each other's arms. They talk about where they might go after they leave, discussing both logical and fantastical options. When she dreamt of the dead, silent girls who'd preceded her in the sultan's bed, Ade asked for their blessing.

One day, a fertility doctor rubbed special oils on Ade's skin and had her kneel for hours of prayer for sons. The experience was a wakeup call for her. Her womb was still empty, but it was only a matter of time before the sultan either gave her a baby, complicating their escape beyond belief, or simply got tired of waiting for her to get pregnant. They couldn't hold off any longer.

The night of their escape, Ade told the sultan a story about a king in a distant, snowy land. His people were wracked by plague, so he and his court secreted themselves in his castle for months of dancing and feasting. The sultan listened raptly; he'd always liked hearing about other people's flaws, as long as they didn't seem like metaphors for his own.

"One night, during a masquerade, a beautiful lady seemed to show up out of nowhere," Ade told the sultan. "She dressed like a court woman--better than a court woman, really, in all the finest silks and jewels. No one had seen her before, but no one could imagine how she could have forgotten through the locked doors. She made her way through the ballroom, inscrutable behind her mask, passing from partner to partner. There was something intoxicating and terrible about her, that no one could look away from.

"When it came time to unmask, she was dancing with the king. He reached out to her mask--a beautiful mask, all sculpted silver and gold--and pulled it off with trembling fingers." She paused, drawing out the suspense and giving her voice a brief rest.

The sultan waited, eyes glittering with the fierce need of an addict. "What did he see?" he asked breathlessly.

Ade looked at him: this sad, broken, vicious little boy who chewed up women like candy. She wondered if there was ever a point in his life when he could have been saved, or if the evil had been planted in him from the beginning. She would probably never know.

"He saw Death," she said, and stabbed the sultan in the neck. "And She was beautiful." She dragged her knife across the sultan's throat, holding her hand over his mouth to smother his last gasps for air. The air around them crackled with ghosts as the dead wives stuck invisible fingers through his skin and ripped out pieces of his soul. He collapsed in a tangle of bright red and pale flesh, the smell of shit filling the air.

And just like that, she stepped out of her cage. It was as easy as taking her first breath after a lifetime underwater

She wiped off her knife off on the sultan's blankets and dressed herself in his simplest set of shirt and trousers. She'd placed a bag under the mattress last night, along with her weapon, and she stuffed it with all the jewels and coins she could find.There was a ceremonial axe on the wall, which she used to dispose of the two guards conveniently keeping their backs to the bedroom door. Her skin buzzed with adrenaline, the rush of a story come to life in all of its fierce and bloody glory.

There was a fine bronze lamp in that room, a lamp that looked a lot like the one in a story about a jinn that she had told the sultan. Ade took this lamp to a room a few corridors away from the sultan's chamber and splashed its oil all over the floor. She used the remaining oil to soak a long curtain tassel, which she then laid on the floor. Finally, she took a candle and lit the end of the tassel, before dashing away as fire flickered slowly down its length.

Nnedi was waiting for her at their assigned meeting place, arms full of supplies, and lead her to the stables. The unlucky stable boy lay tied up and unconscious in a corner, bleeding from a slight wound in his head. "He fought harder than I expected," Nnedi said as Ade offered her one of the guard's weapons. Her hands shook slightly and there was a bruise on her cheek from wrestling with the boy.

"His spirit will suffer for this. They all will," she murmured, bowing her head. Ade nodded, hating the forces that had pushed them to this, made them sacrifice a bit of their souls to survive.

But they both knew there was no turning back now, so when Nnedi looked up again her eyes were bright and clear. "Let's go," she said, her voice rock steady.

They loaded up one of the camels before Ade climbed on, clinging with sweaty fingers. Nnedi had spent her childhood alongside horses and cows, so it wasn't that big a leap to carefully guide the beast through the palace grounds, talking softly in its ear.

By the time they reached the gate, all of the guards were already sprinting back into the palace, attracted by the shouts of fire. Hopefully, Ade's prepared inferno was far enough the sultan's chambers that people wouldn't stumble upon the bodies while rushing to put out the blaze. She glanced over her shoulder and saw her homemade jinns winking at her from a window, twinkling merrily as it covered their escape.

After they passed the gate, Nnedi climbed up in front of Ade and nudged the camel into motion. They vanished into the night unnoticed, quick as the wind and quiet as the dead. Ade wrapped her arms around Nnedi's muscled back, feeling the other girl's pulse vibrate through their ribcage.

She already knew that the way ahead would be hard. They would have to fight and bleed, steal and lie, be driven to snapping at each from the stress and fear. The camel would be traded for bare feet, for a horse, for a stolen boat or carriage. They would know fear, hunger, and thirst in abundance. They would be pushed to their limits and discover things about themselves that they never imagined possible. And it would all be worth it.

Now, the black-haired archer lefts out a cranky groan. "Seriously, Red? My aunt doesn't even know I'm coming, and it's already a goddamn mass pilgrimage at this point."

"And whose fault is that?" Red says sweetly. She gestures at Nnedi and Ade, who are regarding the conversation with identical expressions of confusion. "They're lost, they're in love, and when I look into their eyes I see mirrors. Don't tell me you don't see the same."

She walks up to Ade, and when Ade looks at her she understands what this Red means about mirrors. The girl may be strange, but her eyes bear the same marks of constant fear, of desperately clinging to hope, that Ade sees whenever she looks at Nnedi or her face in a pool of water.

"You," says Red. "You sound like a storyteller. Could you tell us the story of how you got here? No lies, if you please, or careful omissions. We want to know you. And afterwards we'll tell you our story, about where we're going and the map Snow here," she points to the archer, whose scowl has started to grudgingly relax, "has in her boot. And than you can either leave or come with us, whatever you choose."

Nnedi's hand finds Ade's. She knows what the other girl is wondering: does Ade want to tell another story at knifepoint, after all she's done to escape those very circumstances? If she can't bear the idea, Ade knows that Nnedi will fight to the death to get them out of here, outnumbered or not.

But the circle of girls has started lowering their weapons, their expressions slowly turning curious, even friendly. Even the s/he leaning against the tree has offered them another smile, this one without fangs. The idea of thieves who are girls like them, who want to avoid wreaking unnecessary damage, seems to ring with them. They bears the same familiar marks of terror and hope that Ade saw in Red, and she finds that she doesn't really mind telling them a story. Even the skinny blond girl whispering quietly at the thin air to shut up and listen doesn't bother her as much as it should. 

So she squeezes Ade's hand and whispers, "It's okay. I'm okay." Everyone's sitting down now, so Ade and Nnedi sit do the same. She wonders if Nnedi sees her abandoned 'sisters' in the faces of this new group, if it'll make her more or less likely to stay. Because depending on the story Red has to tell them, Ade thinks they might. Why not?

She doesn't think about that now. Instead, Ade straightens her back and lets the storyteller's voice flow out, deep and rich and imposing. She sees the change in her audience immediately, the attention and respect they feel without meaning it.

"We come from the eastern lands. There is-was-a sultan there whose first wife betrayed him, so he decided to cope by marrying a virgin every night and having her strangled every morning." The girls look angry at this, but not shocked or disbelieving; they've clearly heard and seen their share of horrors. "He'd killed Allah knows how many before my father, a small-time merchant, tried to advance himself by selling me into marriage. Nnedi here was a slave in the sultan's palace...."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Schehezerade is one of the main characters from One Thousand And One Arabian Nights. The last story she tells the sultan is inspired by 'The Masque of the Red Death' by Edgar Allen Poe, and her creative use of an ordinary lamp is inspired by Aladdin.
> 
> Nnedi is loosely based on one of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, even though the other eleven had a very minor role in this story. Her name is inspired by Afrofuturist fiction author Nnedi Okorafor.


	8. Nothing Is Stable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the journey ends, but the story is certainly far from over.

"Do we have to kill it?" Ade asks, as she, Gretel, Ariel, Nightingale, and Red press their backs against a rock. "I think it's a member of an endangered species." A jet of bright flame soars overhead, accompanied by another thunderous roar. It catches in a tree, but sizzles out quickly--thank god for the recent storms.

"Not to mention that it's very pretty," Red chimes in, plucking a few bright, bloody scales off the side of her axe. "It's like a very toothy, very cranky rainbow."

Ariel rolls her eyes. "Dry landers have shitty standards. I've seen baby sea serpents who pack a more impressive wallop than" The dragon lunges at Nnedi and she dodges out of the way, causing it to crash headfirst into a tree, "that. Not to mention the...rabies, you call it? I'm pretty sure putting it out of its misery would a be kindness at this point."

The dragon does, indeed, have a froth of acid dripping from its mouth and splattering across the ground. It's also rather small, about the size of a particularly large and hasty horse. Pus leaks from a wound on its side and its herky-jerky movements are less than majestic or coordinated. Killing it won't be the most heroic thing they've ever done, but hey, the beast started it.

"Will all of you please be quiet?" Gretel asks, anxiously twirling a golden braid around her finger. "I'm trying to concentrate--and that means you, too, Hansel," she adds, sticking out her tongue at thin air. Suddenly a massive branch rips from a trees, flies through the air, and hits the dragon in the wing, sending it off balance enough for Snow to send an arrow through a chink in its scales while Tiana plunges a sword into its leg.

"And that's my cue, darlings!" Red announces, throwing herself up and back over the rock. She charges at the wounded dragon with her battle-axe held high, shrieking "ST. GEORGE SUCKS DICK!" at the top her of lungs.

Gretel clutches her head with a loud groan. "No shouting..." Song pats her on the arm.

Ade looks over at her with concern. "Are you all alright?"

"Fine...sort of. Using magic on that scale always make me feel like I have a hangover. Or what I always thought a hangover would be like, I've never been drunk. And Hansel always wants to clap for me whenever I use my powers, the passive-aggressive shithead."

"Is it hard, having a personal ghost?" Ade wonders. Real or not, she can't imagine being followed around by the sultan's dead girls all day. It's bad enough seeing them--and him--in her nightmares.

But Gretel just shrugs. "Irritating as fuck, but not actually that bad. I guess he's sort of a reminder that I'm broken, but I'm still functioning, you know? Plus, he's pretty good at cracking me up."

"Mermaids don't have ghosts," Ariel says, rubbing one of her useless legs the way she sometimes does while thinking of home. "I've seen some around shipwrecks, though. They all seemed very mad at their captain, which I never thought was fair. It's not like he forced them to go on a long journey through an environment they weren't built for." Her face darkens. "Unless they were slaves. I guess the slaves had a real right to be mad, and they knew it, because they...showed it very clearly." Nightingale hums a few bars in a funeral dirge, her face understanding.

They all sit her for a few minutes in silence, listening to the roars and screams of the battle behind as they meditate on ghosts, slavery, and revenge. Then their thoughts are shattered by a loud of thump and a chorus of triumph shrieks. When they turn around, Red is cheerfully hacking her way through the beast's neck as it goes through its death throes. The others are dodging away from the unnecessary sprays of blood, calling her a crazy moron in a variety of colorful ways.

Gretel frowns at the sight. "Wait," she asks, "Where's Silver Bird?"

Nightingale stays with Ariel while Ade and Gretel run through the woods, calling Silver Bird's name. They finding her with her back to a smoldering tree trunk, clutching her arm and staring straight into space. New burns hiss on her skin, mixing with the old ones. She's taking slow, deep breaths, trying to drown at both the pain and the memory of her stepmother's voice. Rabid dragons didn't scare her, but the past did.

"I'll get Red, she'll know what to do with that arm," Ade said as she dashed off. Gretel knelt cautiously by Silver Bird's side, careful not to touch or startle her. "Silvie? It's me, Gretel. You're here, you're safe." Silver Bird didn't respond, although her grip on her arm relaxed a little.

Gretel shot a worried look at Hansel, who was sitting on Silver Bird's other side. "What should I do?"

He shrugged, looking sad. "Just...what you're doing, I guess? I think this is the kind of thing you can't help riding out."

So that's what she did. They sat together as Red made a poultice and rubbed it on Silver Bird's wounds, before Gretel was finally able to coax her to her feet. She held Silver Bird's hand as she walked for the rest of the day, murmuring about meaningless things in her ear. When they finally stopped for camp, Silver Bird was able to murmur a soft "Thank you" in Gretel's ear before curling up in each other's arms. The two girls held each other tight, willing each other's memories away.

They were getting close. That's what it said in the map in Snow's boot, anyway, and they all decided to believe it because what else could they do? Snow would lapse into deep periods of silence at times, worrying about how she would convince her aunt to handle all the new guests she'd shown up with. Everyone else was quietly frightened that they wouldn't be allowed to stay in the tower, although no one wanted to say anything out loud. The dream of security was fragile as it was precious.

Finally, a day came Snow found herself squinting through the trees, looking for a flash of looming stone. She didn't want to get anyone's hopes up, but it made her heart pound to imagine that this long, bloody, exhausting journey would finally be over. She thought of the things she'd done, the people she'd killed, and hoped that her aunt-not to mention her mother's ghost-would understand.

Snow was so busy looking for the tower that she didn't see the girl sitting against the tree trunk, but she did hear her sobbing. She came to a dead stop, Song bumping into her back with a grunt of surprise.

The girl was wearing a ragged, bloodstained dress and had bruises on her feet. Her blond hair had been roughly sawed off, with a nasty cut bleeding on the back of her neck. She lay curled in on herself, sobbing like her soul had been torn apart.

By now, the sight of bloody and abandoned girls should have been familiar to the group, but there was something about this one that made their blood run cold. Girls shouldn't be left broken so close to the witch's tower, that special, impossible place of refuge that they had told themselves so many stories about. They approached her slowly, hands on weapons, almost hoping it was some kind of test or trap.

Snow knelt carefully in front of the girl, asking "Are you all right?" The girl sat up with a gasp, eyes wide and sparks of magic dancing between her fingers. She was witch-trained, than, or at least witch-touched.

"Hey, it's okay," Snow said, holding her hands in the air. "We're not here to hurt you, I swear."

The girl's eyes narrowed as her hand curled into a glittering fist. "I've heard that bef-" Her breath suddenly hitched with surprise and she stopped, arm falling back to her side.

"You-your eyes," the girl gasped out, pointed at Snow's beetle-back eyes. "They look just like my mother's." Her own violet, tear-stained eyes were huge.

Snow's heart skipped a beat and she sat up straight. Her mother had once said that she shared her black eyes with her aunt.

When she was able to speak, her voice was shaking slightly. "Are you, are you Rapunzel?" The girl nodded, a look of dawning comprehension on her face.

The others didn't understand why Snow suddenly slumped in herself, letting out a sound halfway between a moan and sob. Her cry echoed through the woods, more haunting and frightening than a million ghosts.


	9. What Happened To Rapunzel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our ultimate villain's backstory is revealed, and things start to look very bad before they can even hope to get better.

Once upon a time there was a prince whose parents treated him very badly. He had no hopes or dreams, no gentle ghosts by his side or loving siblings to protect him, no better stories to tell himself or friends in whom he could see his experiences reflected. This is how little children are turned into monsters.

The physical and mental abuse caused his heart to shatter, and the pieces were sharp enough to draw blood. He eventually managed to accident his parents away, but the damage was done.

Cut to the prince's twenty-first birthday, which took place on a snowy winter's night. It was the kind of party where blind beggars were expected to fight as a matter of course, but a man wanting to discuss fine artwork or pretty servant girl refusing to lift her skirt was a mortal sin--a very medieval party, the kind enjoyed by kings for centuries. Wine flowed in abundance, as did the opium, and the prince had probably taken a little bit of both when the witch knocked on the door.

She didn't look like a witch, of course, although if the prince had been allowed to listen to more fairy stories as a child, instead of chanting his catechisms or being expected to attend his parents' 'needs' in the bedroom, he would have recognized this. As it was, cue the rose, cue the rejection, cue the superpowered light show, cue the agonizing transformation, cue the "find someone to love you as you are or remain a beast forever" ultimatum.

This was a breathlessly stupid move on the witch's part, of course. Any social worker could tell you that you can't take ruined children and expect other, prettier children to fuck them back to mental health. If the beast had been merely damaged it might have worked, but his soul was a toxic disaster zone at this point, and denying him control of his own body--after his parents had so often done the same thing to him--only made things worse.

And of course, there was the fact that the newly created Beast had claws made of pure magic. Having those claws rammed into her guts didn't exactly kill the witch, but she was forced to pour so much of her power into regrowing her heart that she wasn't able to stop the Beast from ripping off her head. He regretted it afterward, of course; now he couldn't torture the old bitch into reversing her spell.

So the Beast did the next best thing and started consulting all the great magic users of the world. They cast spell after spell, but none of them could break the witch's curse. He hired a few of them to create love potions, but apparently the witch had closed out that particular loophole, leaving him with nothing more impressive than a hysterical girl screaming in his bed the next morning. A few of his advisers complained about the demands taken on the treasury, and were quickly relieved of both their posts and their lungs.

Finally, a withered old sorcerer told the Beast that only the witch's magic would be able to reverse the spell. And while no power on Earth could coerce the witch's ornery old spirit into doing another's will, there was a rather unsavory way for the Beast to take that power for himself. Only a truly desperate man would try it, but the Beast had passed desperation three sheddings ago.

So that was how he ended up digging up the witch's rotting corpse and eating it, maggots and all. It was probably the moment he went totally, beyond-all-repair, redemption-arc-down-the-drain batshit crazy, but who was counting at that point?

The results were...mixed. On the one hand, the Beast was only able to remove a few patches of fur and shorten his front incisors enough to somewhat improve his lisp. On the other hand, he now had magic crackling in his veins, raw and bright and exhilarating. He might not have been able to fully undo old spells, but he could cast new ones. He liked these new powers, hard earned on as they had been. And he wanted more.

So, the beast went hunting. He sought out the weakest conjurers first, the ones no one would miss because no one had noticed them in the first place. By the time that his stronger targets knew about him, he was strong enough to go to head-to-head with them. Some enemies he barely escaped with his life, some he avoided altogether, some were considered too pitiful for his attention. Nonetheless, the bodies piled up as Beast's physical form became slowly more human.

Soon he was more beautiful than he'd ever been, but that didn't stop him from relentlessly seeking more magic. He needed it; needed the strength, the superiority, the pure adrenaline rush. He told himself that he was a victim of injustice protecting others from the same fate, that he was a God-fearing man cleansing sinners from the earth. He told himself whatever he needed to keep feeding.

Of course, the Beast didn't spend all of his time waging a lonely war against edible magic users. He found time to collect a few wives--not all at once, of course, he wasn't a bloody Easterner. He really meant to have one and keep her, but he'd get so angry at times, so bored...and you know what they say about fishes in the sea.

He'd purchased his latest bride from her father, a merchant with a taste for gambling and laudanum. She had a name, but the Beast didn't like it so he decided to just call her Beauty.

Unlike the Beast, Beauty had been exposed to plenty of good books as a child, thanks to the efforts of her mother and older sisters. She had learned from all the stories of scrappy youngsters who used their ingenuity and imagination to outwit monsters. She'd quickly taught herself how to please her new husband in every way possible, no matter how painful or nauseating she found it. 

As a result, she'd managed to outlast all his other brides with only minimal scarring on her soul. The Beast even let her use his library, which he seemed to think rendered him a gentleman of great sophistication even though he never even touched the books.

He still hurt her, of course; he just didn't cause any permanent damage.

Every time her husband left the castle, the girl who'd been renamed Beauty was at once relieved and horrible guilty; after all, her respite came at the cost of someone else's life. Sometimes, she would find herself looking up from her book to study a kitchen knife or a pair of scissors, wondering what her blood would look like splashing on the floor. So far, it had been nothing more than idle wondering...so far.

When her belly began to swell, the thoughts only became worse. She'd while away the hours reading to her baby, dramatically retelling fairy tales and adventures stories while the image of throwing herself off the banisters cycled through her head.

Her pregnancy was probably the only thing keeping her alive at this point--the Beast hadn't touched her in months, a fact that she would be grateful if it have such dangerous implications. If their child was a daughter, she'd be dead, too. If he was a son...she didn't want to think about it. The Beast would turn him into a monster.

But life--the act of reading, of breathing, of remembering her mother and sisters, of seeing the sun rise and smelling the flowers, of feeling the baby kick inside her, of surviving for months beyond any of the other girls--had kept her from ending things. So far.

And soon, the choice would be taken for her.

It was a very nice tower, wrapped in glittering vines under the control of a powerful witch. The Beast had heard rumors that this particular witch, a Far Eastern transplant named Jia, had actually adopted a daughter whom she had shared some of her power. The idea of grabbing two magic users under one roof made the Beast's addicted veins sing.

He'd have to be careful, though. The energy generating from this tower had almost been enough to knock him off his feet; the witch's powers were rumored to be very impressive, and her daughter's were only growing. He couldn't go in with a self-enchanted sword in one hand and a fist of magical fury in the other, as noble as that made him feel. Nor could he try using one of the thoughtforms he'd be working on, since none of them were advanced enough for a mission of such finesse and skill.

So he set about enchanting himself. The Beast kept his muscular outline and dashing good looks, but took a few years off his age so as to appear more naive, more vulnerable. He added a few layers of filth, blood, cuts, and bruises to his delicate skin. He tore up his fine clothes just enough to suggest a gallant struggle, but made sure that he was still clearly a prince. Finally, with gritted teeth, he broke his own leg, a few ribs, and some of the bones in his arm. When he hobbled up to the witch's tower and collapsed in the shadow of the nearby trees, the groan of pain he let out was all too real.

Jia's daughter was the one who found him. She was a beautiful young girl with golden waves of hair flowing out around her in a gravity-defying tangle, shifting and twisting as if it had a mind of its own. The magical food that Jia had fed her when she was small, in an effort to counteract years of malnourishment at her parents' hands, had had the added benefit of filling her with raw magic. When the Beast saw her, it took all of his considerable willpower to avoid being overwhelmed by two very different kinds of lust: for her body, and for her power.

She used that enchanting hair to gather him, pressing delicate yellow strands to his most severe wounds as she shouted for her mother. When Jia arrived, she was too busy stopping the Beast's self-inflicting internal bleeding to even look for signs of magic as they carried him into the tower.

The Beast lay obediently still as they tended to his wounds, permitting them to brew their potions and set his bones. He gasped out a perfectly believable story about bandits on the side of the road, all the while keeping his magic stuffed down deep inside himself where the witch couldn't see it. He also resisted up the temptation to peer up Rapunzel's skirt, although he permitted himself some understandable gawping at the way her head floated around her head and casually snatched ingredients from the shelves.

Rapunzel seemed to be smitten with him, something the Beast found very agreeable. She careful explained that she and her mother were magic and would do everything in their power to take care of him. He permitted her to spoon soup into his mouth until he decided that he had taken enough of the witch's healing drugs that he would be expected to go to sleep. As he pretended to drift off, the Beast made sure to mutter a few sweet nothings about angels, and was rewarded with a blush.

In the middle of the night he finished healing himself, got about, and went to go kill Jia. She was still attractive enough at her age that he would have liked to fuck her beforehand, but her power was too developed to mess around with.

As it was, the witch still left a few nasty burns on his chest and hands after she woke up to find him strangling her. They ended up on the floor before he was finally able to rip break her neck with a satisfying crack. He let out a satisfied sigh and set about eating her entrails.

The racket woke Rapunzel, whose scream shattered all the glass in her mother's bedroom. Nonetheless, she was too shocked and horrified to defend herself before the Beast used his freshly amplified abilities to seize control of that charming hair of hers, binding it into one neat rope and winding that rope around his wrist. Rapunzel screamed louder as she was dragged towards him, her feet slipping in her mother's blood. The floor cracked under their feet, but the Beast just hummed, unconcerned.

"It's all right," he whispered, gazing into her eyes. That shocking violet color looked even more beautiful when it was glossy with tears. "It's all right, the witch is dead. Don't you know that things always get better when the witch is dead?" He reached out and ran a gentle finger down his face, smiling as her hair twisted and wriggled desperately in his grip.

She really was quite lovely. He'd been planning on using her and killing her, but perhaps she might be entertaining for a few weeks as his next bride. Bella was fine, but even the nicest meal grows boring after a while. Pretty little Rapunzel, her eyes going wide as she realized that the weapon she'd always relied on was being turned against her, looked like quite an exotic dish.

He was so lost in his thoughts that she didn't see her fingers twitch, or the knife coming flying from the kitchen and into the room. She swiped through her own hair with one brutal blow, causing to slop limply over his hands, as grey and dead as overcooked spaghetti. He was still trying to recover from his shock when she drove the knife towards his throat. He instinctively ducked, and it sliced through his eyes instead.

The Beast fell to his knees, screaming, as a blast of uncontrolled energy sent Rapunzel flying out of the room. She scrambled to her feet and hurtled through the tower door, sprinting into the night with the speed and dexterity that can only come from running on pure adrenaline.

By the time the Beast had healed the damage to his eyes, the girl was long gone. He didn't mind. Her essence hung heavy in her hair, and using it to track her was a matter of course. It wouldn't take much effort to hunt her down.

When he did, he would be pleasantly surprised to discover that she was no longer alone.


	10. Attack Of The Farm Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which desperate situations forces some characters to go to strange places.

Rapunzel sits besides a fire, bandages on her bloodied feet and the back of her neck. The colors of her world are strange and distorted, melting into each other like running paints. Sometimes all she can hear is her own beating heart, and sometimes the sounds around her are deafening.

People are talking. Some of them are yelling, some of them are waving their hands around, at least one girl is crying. The skinny girl with the pale hair, the one she heard someone call Nightingale, is humming quietly to herself. A few feet, a girl with blond braids appears to be babbling hysterically to a tree.

She doesn't care. Her mother is dead, her blood defiling the floors of their home. Her hair--the source of so much of her magic, the thing that would make her unique among witches--is gone. The one who is responsible (the one she'd flirted with, oh _God_ ) walks free, unpunished, untouched. Nothing else matters after that.

The girl who's supposed to be her cousin, Snow, sits by Rapunzel's side, holding her hand. Rapunzel can't bear to look at her face, at those eyes that are so like her mother's. She always wished that she could look more like Jia, instead of like the people who'd made the first years of her life a living hell.

Her mother would find her staring at the mirror, glaring at inconvenient freckles and features that were too round. She'd wrap her arms around Rapunzel and whisper, "You are like a drop of sun that fell to earth and blessed my life. You are beautiful precisely as you are."

If she ever looked into a mirror again, she would see a ruin. And her mother wouldn't be there to make her feel better.

The noise seems to be getting louder, battling with the silent scream in her head. She's not sure why--oh, right, she told them all her story, about the monster who had shown up at her mother's door a few days? hours? seconds? ago. The words had dropped from her lips, heavier than stones, and with just as brutal an impact.

Voices nip at her ears like flies:

"...supposed to be safe..."

"...I didn't ask any of you to come with me, you asked..."

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit"

"We, we we we _killed_ people to get here, and now it's, it's just like everywhere else, it's worse..."

"Where the hell're we supposed to go, home?"

"Home, we can't go home, God..."

"We could take him, I know we can."

"Don't be fucking ridiculous, you heard what Blondie said, it's not possible. You were supposed to crazy, not stu-"

"Fuck, Red, get off of her!"

Hmm? Oh, this is a little interesting. The girl in the hood-Red-is wrestling with someone whose face Rapunzel can't see, probably because they're being buried under a tangle of wild hair as Red tries to sink her teeth into their throat. Some people, including Snow go to break them apart while others continue yelling at each other. Everybody's voice rise into the night, propelled on an expanded tide of stress, confusion, and fear.

Rapunzel still isn't talking or moving, so she's the only one who notices when Nightingale starts humming. She sees the other girl tilt her head in the direction of the surrounding forest, eyes narrowed and fingers drumming on her leg. Then she sees something that makes fall backward with shock, fingers scrabbling for the knife at her belt as she trills a thunderous alarm call.

And just like that, everything grinds to a halt. The fight stops, the voices go dead, and a fresh jolt of panic jerks Rapunzel out of her half-daze. She twists around to see, her blood running cold at the sight.

There's a young man standing at the edge of their clearing. There's absolutely nothing special about him: nondescript face, ordinary brown hair, dull peasant clothes that are simple without being ragged, perfectly standard build. He is humble and unassuming in the extreme, the epitome of the fairy-tale firebox. He has a club in his hands.

If it weren't for his startling appearance there'd be nothing unusual about him. Nothing, except to the two perfect clones standing to either side of him, both holding nets. Nothing, except that his eyes are as empty and dead as the Beast's were after he killed her mother.

An arrow sinks into one farm boy's chest, and another one instantly appears in his place. And then there are more, and more, surrounding them in a perfect circle. Some carry clubs and others wield nets. They regard the group with all the concern of stone statues, and when they smile, they have a few too many teeth.

They lunge and the battle begins, fierce and gory and beautiful. Rapunzel finds herself lurching to her feet, propelled by the vicious flash of her new companion's blades and the miss of raw magic in the air. She screams, unleashing what's left of her power and watching with satisfaction as bones snap and heads explode.

It's not enough, of course. Rapunzel knows this even in the thick of battle, even if no one else seems to recognize it. She's too exhausted by her desperate flight, they've all been surprised, and the ranks of farm boys-thoughtform, she remembers from her mother's lessons--seem endless.

She wonders if she'll go to hell for bringing so many others to the Beast's attention. As a club smashes into her ribs, she wonders if she's in hell already.

Red is in that wild place, now, where her axe blade sings for blood and the agonizing memories of the past are all tangled up with the wild fear of the future. The aftermath of battles is the time she most resents being broken, remembering how she acts like a wild, vicious animal in front of people she considers comrades in arms.

But for now, she is beyond shame. The rage has broken out from the confines of her skull and manifested as sprays of blood, screams so loud she can see them shining in the evening air. Red is not just a hair color or a covering of blood; it is the way she sees the world. It is the dark wolf at her center, howling and snapping for more.

So when she sees the people she loves to fall, she's too angry to be afraid, even when they beat her to the ground and tangle her in a net. Through a haze of filth and sweat, she watches as a farm boy sprays a gas in the air that causes the bleeding, battered girls to collapse, limp and twitching. Not Red, though. She couldn't lose consciousness if she tried. Her brain is away in crimson fire, brighter than a billion nightlights.

But then her rage pushes all the way through to the other side, to a crystal-clear clarity that only the very wise or the very mad can manage. Luckily, Red is both. So she freezes, burning from the inside out as the men gather around their silent bodies, waiting for an opportunity.

One of the farm boy looks down at their limp bodies, eyes glowing with a strange light. He points at Gretel, Nnedi, Rapunzel, Silver Bird, and Snow; those girls are snatched up and tied onto horses that have been led from the trees. Red frowns, confused, until she remembers--virgins. Those girls are virgins. Why, oh why must everything come back down to virginity?

The head farm boys sweeps a casual hand in the direction of Nightingale, Red, and Ade. Rough boots kick and shove them into a tangle. Red grits her teeth, fighting to hold on to her fury, hold on. He gestures at Tiana and Ariel with a look of pure disgust, and they're dumped onto the heap.

As Red watches from the ground, eyes half-open, some of the thoughtform melt into nothing. A few of the others prepare the horses, riding or leading them out of the clearing without a backward glance. The horses move faster than any horse has a right to, and the sound of their hooves vanish within seconds. Only two farm boys remain, and they start piling wood from the now extinguished fire around them. A pyre.

Red thinks of her grandmother and decides that she really, really doesn't like pyres. At all.

She explodes out of her net, her face dead silent, with no energy to waste on howls. The farm boys turn towards her, weapons raised and rough hands grabbing for her throat. Whatever rudimentary programming operates them clearly expects Red to lead with her feet or fingernails, as is the way of trapped girls.

But Red is more wolf than girl, now, so instead she sinks her teeth directly into the closest farm boy's neck. And then she swallows, because that's how you really make it hurt.

Imagine chopping off your own finger. Combine that sensation with sinking into a warm bath on a chilly winter's day. Add one's first orgasm, spliced with the feeling of coming down from high-quality drugs and a bit of pure lightning. You might have a small idea of what it feels like to eat a piece of a being full of magic.

Several dozen miles away, the Beast notices nothing. He usually lets the thoughtforms operate with the closest thing they have to autonomy while doing distasteful tasks, like cleaning the toilet or burning women who aren't suitable for marriage. They're supposed to go through a set series of commands before disintegrating, far from his mind's eyes. He goes back to considering when would be the most tasteful time to get rid of Bella--next Sunday, perhaps?

Red stumbled away from the shrieking thoughtform, eyes rolling in her head. The other two grab her wrist, only to see her bend backwards with an ominous creaking of bones, her waist twisting at an impossible angle as her hair brushes her ankles. Her teeth start clicking and snapping, their outlines starting to warp like melted wax.

When she straightens back up, she headbutts the bleeding thoughtform with enough force that his spine snaps.

The Beast has never even considered the possibility of eating his own thoughtforms. Nor has he ever considered what would happen if someone was lucky enough to bite one. And he has never, ever, considered the possibility of someone like Red, who sees her teeth as as deadly a weapon as an axe. Red, whose limits and proprieties were stripped from her long ago, who lives with an inferno in her bones.

Red twists free and turns to face the other two thoughtforms, baring her teeth in a wicked smile. The bloody haze is back with a vengeance, turning the world into a puzzle of sharp edges and squishy bits, a puzzle she always knows how to solve.

Her flesh warps and twists, her bones shift around under her skin as magic dribbles out of her mouth like drool. She doesn't mind--it doesn't hurt anymore and besides, her mind has already been ripped apart and altered beyond repair. Why not her body?

Claws shine newly in the fading light, and she lunges.


	11. Eat, Drink, And Be Merry, For Tomorrow We Transform

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which various forms of food are consumed, with wildly different results.

Tiana wakes up and everything hurts. Her ribs feel cracked, her left leg isn't working right, and the vision in her right eye is blurry. She's still holding her sword, but the blade has been snapped off, leaving only a battered hilt. She's lying in the grass, with warm bodies pushed in up against her. She pushes herself upright with a groan, the pain briefly making the world spin.

A soft groan rises from near her feet, and she looks down to see... "Ariel!"

Her beloved lies in a battered tangle, blood dribbling from their lips. Their beautiful teeth are smashed and broken, forcing them to hold their mouth open to keep from ripping their own gums apart. Tiana gathers Ariel in her lap with a sob, ignoring her own pain as she strokes the mermaid's blood-matted hair.

She hears more groaning nearby, and looks up to see Ade and Nightingale blinking awake. Ade staggers to her feet, eyes wild and blood dripping from a cut on her cheek. "Nnedi?" she calls. "Nnedi, where, where are you? What happened?"

"The farm boys took her and the rest," says a voice from the shadows. Tiana and the others all look up, their eyes simultaneously going wide with shock.

Red is...red. Only this time it's not blood covering her, but a thin coat of soft crimson hairs. She stands naked before them, bathed in firelight, her back straight and her chin held high. Her hands seem to glimmer and twitch at her sides, fingers shifting from claws to flesh in the space between heartbeats. Her eyes are the only part of her unchanged, shining with that familiar broken fierceness. 

Tiana says what they're all thinking. "What the fuck?"

Red licks her lips, which are still stained with blood, and gestures around the clearing. "They separated out the virgins and rode off on horses. They left a few people to set us on fire, but I got free and took a bite out of one of them, took his magic. It made me...different. Stronger." 'them' apparently stands for the corpses scattered about in a tangle of ragged, dripping pieces. "And I kept eating them after they were dead, until I was able to shape myself."

The fire crackles again, and Tiana turns to see a hunk of meat turning on a spit. Red thrusts her hand into the blaze, the flames politely shifting aside to make room for her fingers, and tosses the sizzling heap on the rock, where several others dry. "I got you all off the pyre and laid you down until you woke. I thought I'd cook the meat, 'cause you guys don't like eating stuff raw."

It takes a few minutes for Tiana to put the pieces together. When she does she's too dazed and shocked to say anything, so it's Ade who asks, "Are you saying you...ate bits of the men who attacked us, and it gave you power? And you want us to eat them, too?"

Red nods. "Yup! I mean, we're good, but we'll never be able to take those dickwads down and save the others if we stay normal. Hell, we won't even be able to find them without magic. If we eat their power, we can make it our own." She rubs a hand over one arm. "I don't think you'll get fur, though. And if you do, you'll probably be able to get rid of it." The hairs Red touches melt back into her flesh, revealing pale white flesh, only to spring back to life a moment later.

"That-that's cannibalism," Tiana staggers out.

Red shrugs. "I guess, even if they're not technically real. But hey, it can't be worse than murder." Tiana opens and closes her mouth, unable to argue.

Ariel shifts in Tiana's lap and waves a hand at the fire, at the bloody corpses. They twist around to look at Tiana and runs a hand through her dreadlocks, their eyes large and soothing.

Tiana looks at Ariel's ruined face, feels the pain in her own ribs. She doesn't know how badly she's hurt, and even if she doesn't die Ariel would never be able to eat again in this condition. "Will it heal us?" she asks. 

Red looks down at herself, brow furrowed. "I...think so? I don't really remember how badly I was hurt before I changed."

Change. Tiana looks at Ariel and she knows they're both thinking about the same thing--Ariel's useless legs, Tiana's painfully wrong genitals. When she heard that the witch was dead, she sobbed, because who would give her a woman's body know? Who would help Ariel walk again? And now...now they have an opportunity to change themselves.

Nightingale looks down at her hands and hums thoughtfully to herself, but Ade doesn't hesitate. She lurches unsteadily towards the fire and grabs a piece of flesh in her hand, taking deep breaths to calm herself. "I don't know about the rest of you, but Nnedi needs me. And we've done far worse to keep each other safe." Without another word, she takes a bite and swallows. Her face barely has time to twist with revulsion before the magic starts rushing through her veins, and she starts collapsing with a shriek.

Even though she knows that it'll hurt, Tiana takes some meat and helps Ariel the rest, because the right to change yourself of your own free will is a precious gift.

Nightingale joins in, because no one needs or fights harder for power than those who have been powerless their whole lives.

And together they hold a surreal feast in the dark night. It's not pleasant--it takes several meals to get addicted, so they'll never hunger for it the way the Beast does--but it is necessary.

The magic hits their hearts like a lightning strike.

Beauty looks out the window and knows that she is going to die. Her husband's wretched thought forms are making their way back to his castle, darting out of the trees at an unnatural speed. And slung over the sides of their horses are a group of limp figures, hair swinging in the wind, the moonlight glinting on slender, bruised bodies. Girls.

When Beauty was brought to this place, there was another girl here. She could see her from the back of the horse the Beast had lent her, peering through the window in a flash of auburn hair and wide, frightened eyes. Beauty-her name wasn't Beauty back then, of course-was left in the dungeon for a day or two, hungry and confused. As they finally led her out, she glimpsed one of the thoughtforms carrying a limp, bloody bundle out of the castle. A bit of auburn peeked out the end, like the last few flickers of a fire.

Her husband hadn't completely scrubbed the blood out from under his nails at the time of their wedding. When she looked into his eyes and responded to her new name for the first time, her voice did not shake. She had done everything in her power to manipulate his ego, to be creative and engaging both in and out of the bedroom. She had tried not to be like the scared, defiant girls who shared his bed before her. She had shoved her fear and rage down between the pages of her books.

She had always known it wouldn't last.

The baby wriggles and twists in the depths of her massive stomach, bringing Beauty back to the present. She sets aside her book and starts stuffing herself full of fruit; not even the onset of one's doom can stall pregnancy cravings. The Beast, if nothing else, has been good at tending to her needs in that regard.

The fact that he'll probably let her live until the baby arrives is small comfort, especially since she's probably a week away from giving birth at best. The Beast hasn't bothered to bring in a midwife, so she's been forced to care for herself as best she can using the books she's found in the library. 

Beauty wonders if he really wants a heir, or if he's just going through with this because it's what men like him are expected to do. She wonders if he'll start to see the child as a competitor and kill it after it's born. She wonders if it would be worse for her child to die or be raised in this place. She wonders if she'll bleed die during childbirth, or if she'll live long enough for him to hurt and kill her the way he did her predecessor. She wonders whether hanging herself from the ceiling would trigger labor at this point. She wonders a lot of things.

And then, as the horses carrying her replacements near through the castle gates, she sees something that distracts her from her wondering. A group of shadows shiver into view at the edge of the tree line, carefully keeping out of sight. Then, as the gates swing open, they dart out into the moonlight.

They're fast, faster than the thoughtforms, as if they're really pushing themselves. She sees one dash along on four legs, another glide just about the ground on outstretched wings, a third twisting through the air like water. Their hair streams in the wind, while their eyes gleam fierce and bright. Weapons wink in their hands like fallen stars. Their outlines bubble and shift, in the unmistakable manner of magic.

Beauty swallows a grape and rises up on her painfully swollen feet, watching as this group of impossible girls races toward the castle. They are a wrench thrown in the gears of the story the Beast has planned for her and his new brides. For the first time since her marriage, she feels a burst of true hope in her belly.

She hears footsteps approaching her chamber, and turns around with a smile plastered on on her face, carefully closing the window behind her. She doesn't know who these new arrivals are, or what they want, but whatever they're doing is happening behind her husband's back. And Beauty will do whatever is necessary to keep it that way.

Outside, the other girls slip through the gates just before they close, locking them all in together.


	12. The Lady's Guide To Storming Castles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things keep looking bad for our heroes, but there are also new superpowers, which make everything a million times cooler.

They've just stepped into the shadow of the castle when Ariel realizes four things:

1\. They've never done anything like this before, and have absolutely no plan. They don't even know who the farm boys are working for, much less where their friends are. Ariel is actually the one with the most experience in tracking down powerful magic users and demanding things from them, like what happened with the witch, and that ended in tears.

2\. Speaking of the witch, just trying to set their feet on the grass makes Ariel dizzy with pain. The power they all absorbed isn't enough to overcome the curses of stronger magic users, leaving them vulnerable to however or whatever took their friends.

3\. The comedown from their impromptu midnight feast is over, and Ariel is just starting to get over the exhilaration of swimming through air like she did in water to remember that she ate human meat-something they promised themselves to never do in front of Tiana. Sure, Tiana was also eating human meat, but at least her stomach didn't growl when it touched her lips. She couldn't help herself: those farm boys smelled even better than shipwrecked sailors. Very embarrassing

4\. Finally, Tiana's form has been rippling and twisting like a storm cloud the entire night, only to finally stop as they approach the castle. She steps into a patch of moonlight, and Ariel realizes that she's sprouted breasts-extremely distracting breasts. And oh, Poseidon, those new hips... Tiana looks over at her and shoots a small smirk, making Ariel color as much as her mottled skill will allow.

They stop ogling Tiana long enough to realize that everyone is just standing in the shadows of the castle garden, staring up at the castle. Even if they'd been able to catch up with the farm boys, the entry hall looks full of candlelight, making sneaking around an impossible option. Now all they gain do is gape at the stone walls in awkward silence.

The only one who doesn't seem slightly disoriented is Nightingale, who twirls her fingers with a smile on her pale face. The rosebushes on a nearby bush open and close their petals in response, shifting from red to white to inky black.

There are more roses on Nightingale's head, peeking out from the tangle of thorns that has replaced her hair. More briars flicker in and out of her sleeves and pant legs, flashing-knife sharp. They scratch against her skin, but draw no blood--Nightingale's flesh now has the color and texture of marble. Her eyes are dark pools, holding multitudes. She hums, and every blade of grass or leaf in sight seems to shiver in response.

Ade chews her fingernails. Of all of them, she appears the least altered by the magic. The only sign that anything is different is the kaleidoscope of bright, flickering colors sliding over her lips, glowing in the soft moonlight. From where she hovers, Ariel can see a smudge of blood drying at the corner of her mouth, and wonders if they should say something.

Red breaks the silence, as is her wont. "Up," she announces, striding confidently towards the castle walls.

Tiana blinks at her, face rippling as it shifts into its proper, feminine form. "Up?" she asks, her voice significantly higher than it was several hours ago.

"Up," Red replies, striding confidently towards the wall. Her ears are larger now, twitching as they absorb the soft buzz of insects in the grass and the distant creaks of moving clouds.

"Villains always hide at the top of the tower," Red says, twitching her fingers so that they shift into thick, gleaming claws. More claws sprout from her feet, flashing in the moonlight. "Didn't you ever learn anything from storybooks?" She slams her hands into the wall, letting out a grunt of satisfaction as her claws catch in stone. "And once we get our villain, we can make him tell us where the others are."

"Well, I don't have any better ideas," says Ade. A razor blade falls from her mouth as she speaks and she catches it, watching with wonder as it grows into a gleaming sword. "Hmm..." A sheath appears, too, and she's able to sling her new weapon over her slender back.

Ariel doesn't have any better ideas either, so they and Tiana head towards the wall, with Song. Tiana spreads her fingers, her face twisted up in concentration, and webbing sprouts between and over her fingers. It's a sticky substance, with a bright green color that Ariel recognizes immediately. "Frogs?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Tiana shrugs. "They kept me fed while I was in that well. Might as well return the favor by paying tribute." She stretches her arms over her head and rolls her shoulders, growing acclimated to her new body: the graceful, muscular girl's body that's always been hiding under her flesh.

Ariel plants a kiss in her long dark hair. "You look beautiful, my pearl," she whispers.

"You swim beautifully, my rose," Tiana replies. It's taken a while, but she no longer blushes at the use of such sappy pet names.

Sentiments over, they ascend together in Red's wake. Tiana's hands and feet suck and push on the castle stone, leaving shiny little marks like bits of emerald. Ariel wraps their legs together and pumps them the way they would their tail, occasionally propelling themselves higher with a powerful blow of their arms against the night air.

Behind, Ade sits crosslegged on a richly colored carpet, slowly rising as she whispers to herself: "Once upon a time, there was a brave warrior whose princess whose stolen by an evil shadow. The warrior donned her strongest armor and went to save her...." Her power, as always, lies in her words, and already she wields it like a virtuoso, making the carpet drift upwards under the sheer force of story.

In the rear, Nightingale places her palms on the ground, lips moving silently. A massive beanstalk pokes out of the earth, sending ripples of dirt flowing in every direction. She finds a comfortable perch near the top and drifts upward, swinging her legs like a child. The stalk twists and bends to avoid being glimpsed by windows, its tip jutting defiantly towards the clouds.

The five figures drift upwards into the night like the world's strangest flock of birds. Their hearts are damaged, but brave and true nonetheless.

Snow wakes up with a groan, temples throbbing and fingers tingling. The ground beneath her is far too soft, and when she stretches out her hands she can't find her bow anywhere. She sits up, blinking, and almost vomits when she realizes where she is.

She's sitting on a bed in a small room with an ornate wood dresser pushed inside a wall, a closet hanging open, and a large door that she already knows will be locked. Beautiful paintings hang on the elaborate moldings and there's a delicately painted chamber pot tucked discreetly under the carved bedstead. For all the opulence she can see where she is: a prison cell.

The panic strikes her, the kind she's only felt in her worst nightmares, and Snow tumbles off the bed with a clatter. She pulls her knees to her chest, gasping, wishing for her bow so much it hurts. Her father, he found her somehow, she knows he did, and now she's going to die and everything, all that running, her mother's sacrifice, will be for nothing...

The door clicks open, and Snow jumps up with a scream. She turns, raising her fists, because His Fucking Highness wants her she's going to go down fighting.

It's not her father standing in the doorway, however, but a man she's never seen before. He's tall and handsome, smoothly muscled with a clean-shaved face and thick dark hair. There's an unmistakable shimmer of magic around his hands and a look of contempt in his face as he regards her stance, before running his eyes up and down her body.

He scares her as much as her father, maybe even more because he's an unknown element, but Snow hasn't survived for so long without learning to push down her fear. "Who the fuck are you supposed to be?" she demands, stomping towards him. "Are you the one who sent that gang of perverts? What the fuck do you want?"

The Beast closes his hand into a fist and a bolt of pure pain launches through Snow's head. She collapses to her knees, screaming and digging her fingers into her hair, trying to dig out the knife embedded in her skull.

It stops suddenly as it starts, and she looks up at the beast, chest heaving, tears running down her face, unable to make her legs work.

"So ungrateful," he muses. "Would you have preferred I let you die in the woods?"

"What?" Snow sputters, rage briefly drowning out her fear. "Nobody was dying until you showed up, you fucking creep! Where are the others, what the hell did you--"

He hurts her again, and this time she can't stop herself from throwing up. Puke scatters across the fancy carpet, and she's gratified to see him hopping back from the mess with a look of disgust on his face.

"I was looking forward to taming you," he snarls, voice ringing through her tender skull. "But perhaps I'll take one of the other bitches as my next wife, instead. The most gentlemanly course might just be reuniting you with your father, Princess Nataylia."

The world spins and goes black at the edges. Snow opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. The name of a weak girl, a dead girl, a piece of prey, reaches up from the dark and chokes her. She wants to ask how, but she knows how-magic. Fucking magic.

"Yes," the Beast purrs. "I know who you are. I know you abandoned, and I know who is looking for you. So you might consider being a bit more respectful when next we meet, before I decide you're not worth my hand."

He stalks out the door, leaving Snow huddled on the ground, staring at her shaking hands. For a moment she's falling into nothingness.

Then she lurches up to her feet, yanks a drawer from the dresser, and throws it at the door with a scream of rage. The next one, too, and the next. When she can't find anything else to throw she draws back her foot and slams into the wall, relishing the shock of pain that runs up her bones. The sound of her own screams sounds as beautiful as a song.

If he opens the door again, she will kill him. And if he tries to send her back, she will kill herself. Snow swore to herself on her mother's soul that she would never be anyone's princess again, and she intends to keep that promise.

After the disappointing encounter with Nataylia, the Beast pokes his head into the rooms of his other potential brides. None of them seem very intriguing.

The brown-skinned one is lost in some kind of waking nightmare, curled in on herself and sobbing about her stepmother. She doesn't even seem to register his presence, even when he jerks her to her feet with his powers and makes her look at him. She just sways there, mumbling about fire and ghosts and wanting to live, her eyes lost in a dark haze. Eventually he just drops her in frustration and moves on.

The black girl actually manages to attack him as he opens the door, lying a pretty decent blow on his ribs with a flying kick. He has to break her leg for that, of course, leaving her howling on the floor and spitting curses.

The blond one with the braids has magic, apparently, so he places her in an enchanted cell. He finds her growling with frustration as she tries and fails to set the floor on fire, babbling frantically at thin air. When he opens the door she presses against the wall, almost like she's hiding behind someone, and stares at him in petrified silence until he leaves. She's the most conventionally attractive of the group--white, pretty, nice long hair--so if he's willing to drug the madness out of her she might be a good bride until he needs to feast again.

He doesn't bother to enter Rapunzel's room--he already knows she's attractive and powerful, after all. He stands outside her door and listens to her pounding her fists on the wall, trying to sob spells through tears of frustration and pain. The sound makes him smile; let the bitch suffer in suspense for a bit for what she's done

For the moment, he decides to put aside the difficult choice of which wife to take next so he can focus on the one he already has. Beauty was as polite and cheerful as ever when he popped in on her earlier, a trait that for the first time has started to grate on his nerves. He reminds himself that defiance can be fun, too, as long as you know how to take it away.

There's still the manner of the child. He was going to keep her around until it was weaned, but perhaps he could have one of his other brides-in-waiting take care of it instead. It can't take a lot of magic to force a girl's breast to give milk, after all. Perhaps he'll give it to the brown-skinned one; she looks like she could be very obedient when she gets over this little fit.

He's gotten sick of waiting for the child to actually show up however. The very sight of Beauty's bulging stomach, the way her coffee-colored limbs have swollen and her relentless need to eat everything in sight, has started making him feel seriously ill. Now that he has new wives he no longer feels an urge to wait.

Inducing birth is a complicated spell, one that will probably involve brewing a potion, something he waits. Still, he's stolen enough enough books of magic over the years--including one owned by Rapunzel's mother--for him to figure it out. And once his son is out of Beauty's body, he'll be free to indulge his darkest desires on it. Maybe he should sharpen his knives during the labor...

The Beast makes his way to the kitchen, smiling to himself. He's so lost in his thoughts about the future that he doesn't even sense the shadows making their way up the walls of his stronghold, with iron determination and veins crackling with new strength.

Even if he could sense them, however, he wouldn't be afraid. He has faith in his own magic, which is perfectly logical considering the years he's spent amassing and honing his power.

Besides, he's a prince. And princes always win the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ade's new talent of manifesting physical objects when she speaks is inspired by the French fairy tale "Diamonds and Toads." The Aladdin and Jack in the Beanstalk references should be obvious.
> 
> I also changed Snow's "real" name from Katerina to Nataylia to keep it from resembling Beauty's.


	13. Double, Double, Boil and Bubble (Or, On The Noisiness Of Witches)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the best heists require a distraction, as painful a fact as that is to confront.

Their little invasion was going quite well until Red almost gets eaten by a window.

She's reached one of the highest points of the castle: a dark little room that "looks like exactly the kind of place that would lead into the villain's throne room, trust me," and sticks her arm onto the sill. Immediately the sill and the top of the window frame shoot towards each other at a blinding speed, the stone wrinkling like skin as it let out a small growl.

Any other arm would have been crushed, but Red's reflexes have been enhanced to the point that she can yank herself backwards, the stone snapping closes a hairs-breadth away from her claws. She plummets into the dark, fur rippling as the night swallow her up.

Ade's cry of "Shit!" makes her carpet rocket several feet higher, with little jets of flame suddenly streaming downwards from the corners. Ariel is writhing around frantically, trying to calculate where to throw herself to catch Red. Nightingale growls and another beanstalk sprouted from the ground, petals spreading as it hurtled upward.

It collapses back to the ground, irrelevant, when Red twists in midair and slams her body back into the wall. She hurtles downward for several feet, claws shrieking against the stone as the others tried to dodge a hail of sparks, before finally coming a stop.

For a moment she simply hangs there, panting, while the others gape in silence.

And then the window just above Red's head slams open and a girl leans out, hissing, "Oh, for the love of _Dios_ \--get inside, you idiots! You've got to be the nosiest witches in history!"

They stare up at her.

"Hurry! My husband's off brewing some ridiculous potion--probably trying to figure out how to get rid of me quicker--so get in here before he gets his head out of his cauldron and hears all the racket you've been making!"

Maybe it's a trap, but the carnivorous windows would have been trap enough on their own. Besides, the girl's eyes have an air of broken desperation that is all too familiar at this point.

So Red scrambles in and the others follow. Tiana is quietly relieved that she could make her hands stop being sticky when she was back on dry ground--she'd been a little frightened of the change being permanent. Ariel rolls through the room and collapses on the bed, exhausted from swimming again after so long. Ade delicately steps from her carpet and onto the windowsill, watching with a still-fresh sense of wonder as said carpet melts back into nothingness.

Their new acquaintance looks them up and down, and they do the same. She's a small girl with brown skin, dark eyes, long black hair, and a very pregnant belly. A pair of spectacles are pushed up on her sweaty forehead, and she pulls them back down to study them more closely.

"Well," she finally declares, turning away. "You may be noisy, but you make a very impressive band of witches. A damn sight better than the half-witted knights we've got showing up here every other month. The last one was _so_ disappointed that my father wasn't a king; seemed to tick him off more than my husband setting him on fire."

"We're not witches," say Tiana slowly.

"Are we witches?" asks Ade at the same time.

"We're the finest witches you'll ever meet," Red says confidently, also at the same time.

"Can I have some of your food?" Ariel asks into the ensuing awkward silence.

"Yeah, sure," the girl says, grabbing a handful of grapes and shoving them into her mouth. "'Ow, oo'll 'ave oo," she swallows, "Now, you'll have to go down three floors to find your companions. He turned the dungeons into this ridiculous parody of an inn, so at least they're a little better off than I was. The two blond girls both have spells on the locks, you'll probably have to combine your powers or something.

"Avoid the maids, they're all thoughtforms--clones, too, it's fucking creepy--and basically function as guards. The only thing they can do is scream really loudly, but if you try to attack one that's exactly what they'll do, and than the bastard'll come running."

They all stared at her some more. "What?" she asks.

"You...you're not coming with us?" Ade wonders. "Didn't you just say he's trying to get rid of you?" She glances around the bedroom nervously, memories of the sultan's palace flickering through her mind. Her fists clench, and she can almost feel the ghosts peering at her from the corners. Just standing in this room makes it harder to breathe; she can't imagine actually _wanting_ to stay here.

But the girl just sighs. "I'm going to need to keep him occupied for as long as possible," she explains, patting her belly with a rueful expression. "He'll want to do something terrible, and I won't just roll over for it like I usually do. It'll throw a gear in the works, and--maybe--keep from him from noticing what you're doing long enough for you to escape."

Their mouths drop open, and Ade's the first to speak. "You'll...you'll do that? You literally just met us, and you'll help us? You'll stay with that monster to keep us safe?"

Beauty sighs and looks down. " I've read enough books to recognize when one of them comes to life. When I saw you, you and your magic, I know my life had stopped being a plain horror story for the first time in a long time. It's an adventure story, and in the adventure stories, people have to step up."

She clasps her hands over her stomach and looks down. "If I don't help you, I'm-we're-doomed anyway. My husband will kill me so he can marry one of your friends, and eventually he'll go through them all like tissues. He'll kill my baby if she's a girl, and if it's a boy he'll be doomed to a long, miserable life--the same kind of life that made my husband what he is today. Maybe you'll come back to save me, and maybe you won't, but at least I'll have made a difference in things. And I am so very tired of very being passive."

Ade steps forward and wraps her arms around the girl in a hug, ignoring her startled _oof_. "I know the feeling," she whispers in her ear. "We will come back to save you both. I swear on my life and the life of the woman I love." She kisses the girl on the temple. "Allah bless you."

The girl rises up on her tiptoes and plants a kiss on Ade's forehead. "And _Dios_ bless you."

Red bows her head in respect, and than the others start towards the door. Tiana carries a still-exhausted Ariel, who's murmuring some kind of prayer in her original language.

Before moving to join them, Ade closes her eyes in concentration, her lips glowing even brighter as her muscles start quiver with tension. When she speaks, her voice is deeper and more sonorous than any of her companions have ever heard it. "A gift worthy of a warrior," she says, and a small object tumbles from her mouth. Ade catches it, holding with her hand as it slowly morphs into a piece of bread.

She sways a little, feeling suddenly tired, before pressing it into the other girl's hand. "We got our powers by eating...things," she explains, a bitter look on her face as she remember the foul taste of farm of boy. "Maybe this will protect you until we get back. I don't know, I..." she blushes, "I haven't had these powers for long."

The girl takes the bread, her eyes lighting up. She may be quietly terrified, but this is _magic_ , offered up in its purest form, and that is not a gift worth throwing away. "My name is Caterina," she says suddenly.

"I am Ade," Ade tells her, and slips out of the room to join the others.

Beauty--Caterina, she hasn't claimed that name is so long--listens to their footsteps fade away, fighting to the urge to come running after them. They have special work to do tonight, and so does she.

She starts chewing on the bread as she sits back down, returning to her book. If she's going to die, she wants to get to a good stopping place first.

"It's all going to be fine," she whispers, rubbing her stomach. She has no idea whether that's true or not, but no mother ever does.


	14. There's Always Some Kind of Potion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is talk of love, parenthood, and casual homicide.

Caterina has finished her book and her bread, although the latter doesn't seem to have had an impact so far, when she hears the Beast's footsteps outside her door.

In less time than it takes it tell it, she's stuffed her glasses back into her pocket and plucked the rose left on her desk behind her ears. It still has its thorns--most of the roses her husband gives her do--but she manages to smile warmly even as blood from a reopened cut trickles down her neck, hidden behind her hair.

The Beast strides into the room, a proud expression on his face and a jeweled goblet she's never seen before in his hand. "Ah, my Beauty," he says, in that ringing voice that would make a girl's knees weak if she hadn't heard it say so many terrible things. "I have a gift for you."

She reaches out as slowly as she can without looking ridiculous; every second counts right now.

"What is it?" she asks, peering into the dull grey contents. Deep down, she already knows what it is. Now that the girls are here, her husband has only one reason to keep her alive, and he's obviously sick of waiting for it to arrive.

"A gift, for you and our son," he says distractedly, already moving to exchange the simple--for him--clothes he wears while brewing potions for a more opulent dinner jacket. "It will make you both stronger."

Caterina waits until he's heading towards the door before setting the goblet down with a loud but (hopefully) nonsuspicious _clink_. He spins to look at her with a growl. "What are you doing?!"

"Oh!" she says, proud of how her steady her voice is. "I thought I was supposed to drink it later."

"I meant _now_ ," he groans, rubbing his face in exasperation. "Stupid bitch."

"My apologies," says Caterina, heart racing. She lifts the goblet to her lips and waits for him to turn away before saying. "Only..."

 _"What?!"_ The Beast stalks towards her, teeth bared and hands glittering with magic. Caterina's hand twitches, but she fights the urge to toss the drink back, anything to make him stop looking at her with those terrible eyes--eyes that haunt her nightmares. 

_They're coming back,_ she tells herself frantically. _They're coming back for me. They're coming back for both of us._

"I'm sorry," she says out loud. "It's just that I have been...nauseous...as of late." She looks down at her feet , hoping he'll mistake her fear for shame (her husband has always had a ridiculous problem with discussions of sexual or bathroom matters). "If I take your lovely drink now, I might, um, throw it all up again later."

He rolls his eyes. "Well, take it in _sips_ , woman," he growls, like that's the most obvious thing in the world. "If you throw some up you'll at least have enough left for it to work." He looks away from her and mutters, most likely to himself, "And it'd _better_ work--I'm bloody sick of waiting."

"Waiting for what?" she asks, before she can lose her nerve.

"What do you _think?_ " he spits, waving a dismissive hand at her bulging breasts and wide hips. "Do you think I'm keeping you around for your _looks_?"

Part of Caterina wants to quail under his contemptuous expression, while another part wants to actually vomit at having her worst suspicions confirmed. A third part of her wants to slap the Beast across the face for _daring_ to insult and intimidate her like that.

But none of those things will give her maybe-rescuers the time they need, so instead she makes herself say, in a voice balanced on a razor's edge between quiver and whine, "You...you do not love me, husband?"

He barks a harsh laugh. "Love? Love you, love _anyone?_ " For a moment, he looks almost sad, the way she's only seen in his most vulnerable moments (which are often followed by his most terrifying). "Love is a _fairy tale_. I had it beaten out of me long ago."

The Beast grabs her hand then, all softness gone from his face, and jerks it upwards so that the edge of the goblet scrapes against her chin. "Now. _Drink._ "

At this moment, she probably should. Not only would it make it happy, it would buy the girls downstairs a few more moments while he waits outside her door to see if it works. Once he hears the sounds of labor start, he probably skitter away in disgust and send a few thoughtforms to "assist her." All of that would take time--precious time, time for the others to regroup and perhaps come rescue her.

But if there is a rescue, giving birth would make things much more complicated. And, besides...Caterina looks into the goblet and realizes, suddenly, that she is as sick of letting this man control her body as she is of being passive. She has no idea what an induced birth will do to her and her baby, and she's not sure how much her husband cares. 

Her husband stares at her as she thinks, looking angry. Always so angry. Angry and broken, damaged beyond repair.

Well, Caterina is angry and broken, too. But she doesn't think she's damaged beyond repair. Not yet, anyway. And she wants to keep it that way.

If she and her baby do have to die tonight, a fact that doesn't scare her quite as much as it would another girl, she wants to be on her own terms.

So she takes a deep breath, draws on fourteen months of bottled-up rage, and says sweetly, "That's all right. I don't love you, either."

Then she smashed the goblet over his shocked face.

He stood there, more astonished than hurt, as she sprinted for the door, ripping the rose from her ear and tossing it on the ground as she did so. She felt like she was watching all of this from a distance, or reading about it in a story and feeling proud of the protagonist's actions.

Caterina had only taken a few steps when her husband grabbed her by the hair and threw her backwards onto the floor. She cried out in pain as her tender body hit the ground, scrabbling to clutch her belly as he walked towards her.

All of her earlier courage had fled, leaving only a burning scream of _what did I just do, how could I be so stupid_. She opened her mouth, wanting to beg for her life or at least the life of her child, but her breaths were coming too fast to form words.

The Beast loomed over her, wine glittering in his hair and his fists clenched at his sides. There's a mad gleam in his eyes, almost as if he relishes having an excuse to _really_ punish her.

"I'm going to turn you into a _cow_ ," he whispered, as the air around them crackled with building power. "A nice, fat cow, just like you are, and I'm going to make you into steaks while you're still _breathing--FUCK!"_

He fell over with a shriek, clutching at his leg. This leg was wrapped in a swiftly growing vine that Caterina could see merrily looping around the Beast's leg, sprouting massive thorns before her eyes. This vine appears to be sprouting from the rose on the floor--a rose that was definitely dead when the Beast gave it to her.

The Beast growled and let out a shriek, causing rose and thorns alike to disintegrate into ashes. He lurched to his feet, pants sooty and bloodstained, gaping at her. "What...how..." His face twisted into a stormy expression. _"Magic."_

Caterina stared up at him, shaking too hard to get up or speak. What could she say to defend herself, anyway? The floor was literally covered in evidence.

"But, but I _scanned_ you!" he stammers, sounding almost like a panicked child. "No power, not even from the child yet, so _how--?_ "

A maid screams from below, making the floorboards rattle and chilling Caterina's blood.

_Shit._


	15. And The Maid Screamed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the jig is up.

Someone opens the door and Silver Bird scrambles backward across the floor, hands raised, any earlier attempts at calm forgotten. "Pleas," she gasps, shaking. _I'm sorry stepmother I don't know what I did please don't hurt me again please--_

"Hey, it's okay," says Ade, raising her hands. Twirling blades of straw drift from her lips as she speaks, scattering across the floor. "Shit," she mutters, and the straw shifts to a stream of gold coins. "Sorry," she says, her voice loud and quick over the clatter of metal. "I don't have the hang of this yet."

Silver Bird gapes at her, all her fear blown away by sheer shock. "What-how-?"

"We...kind of ate, some people?" Ade says carefully, looking relieved when her words don't produce any new apparitions. Something silver flashed between her fingers. "I...I repeated everything I knew about you guys to myself and I managed to talk someone skeleton keys into existence." She reaches her out her hand. "Now, come on, we need to get out of here so we can save Caterina."

For the moment, Silver Bird decides to just go with the flow--at least she's getting _out of this cell_ , which is the important thing. She staggers outside to find the others gathered around two doors bearing some very impressive, shiny locks. The locks don't actually appear attached _to_ anything, but the doors are still refusing to budge no matter how much Nightingale jabs with the keys or how much Red kicks at the wooden planks.

Silver Bird skids to a stop, gawping at she realizes how much some of her companions have changed since she last saw them. Ariel is literally bumping against the ceiling, and she's pretty sure the thorns poking out from Nightingale's sleeve just _waved_ at her.

Before she can ask Ade any more questions, however, the other girl unlocks Nnedi's cell and gets slammed in a passionate lip-lock against the far wall.

As she's led out of her own room, Snow gives a small shrug. "Let's save the drowning in shock and confusion for later," she suggests. "No matter what the fuck's going on, at least I won't be going back to my father right now." That seems as good a plan as any, so Silver Bird nods and they both go to attend to the meaning of the locks.

"How it's going?" Snow asks Tiana and Nightingale, who are standing back to back, face screwed up in concentration as power flickers from their hands.

"Not good," Tiana mutters, speaking in a voice that Silver Bird literally wouldn't recognize if it wasn't coming from her mouth. "We've got some rough-edged magic down, sure, but we don't know any spells for _simple_ things like opening enchanted doors--"

"We do," interrupts Gretel's voice from behind one of the others doors; Silver Bird can't help stiffening at the welcome sound. "Or we _might_ , anyway, if that stupid fucker's spells didn't have such a lock on her powers.

"You're-you're taking this remarkable well," Tiana grunts. The space behind Rapunzel's door remains silent, quietly underlining her words.

"Eh," Gretel replies, and Silver Bird can image her shrugging. "Hansel's been singing folk songs at the top of his lungs for the past half hour. Does a pretty good job of keeping me calm, really."

Before anyone can reply to that statement, Red's face brightens. "You just need more magic, right?" she asks. "You already have the know-how."

"We _might..._ " says Gretel, carefully, but she cut's off when Red suddenly sticks both thumbs in her mouth and _fucking bites them off_.

"HOL--" Silver Bird and Snow scream in unison, only an Ade who's somehow managed to extricate herself from Nnedi to cover their mouth. "Shhh," she whispers frantically, eyes darting over her should to see just what they're looking at, "You'll alert the maids, and--oh _dear._ "

Red looks up at them, a digit held in each hand. "What?" she asks. "We ate raw magic in flesh form, so if someone ate us they'd probably be able to gain a little boost. That must be what the Beast is doing; he couldn't possibly have gotten that powerful by being a nice little wizard. It might not be enough _change_ them or anything like us, but it'll could give them the strength they need to bust out."

"That is..." Tiana breathes, "surprisingly logical, but you can't just _bite off your own fucking fingers._ "

Red shrugs. "Why not? They'll grow back anyway." She waggles her stumps, which have indeed stopped bleeding and look a little smoother then before.

They're all still processing that when Red slides one thumb under each door. "Dinner's ready, chickadees," she calls out.

There's a dull silence, before Gretel says: "Hansel is telling me that using him as a coping mechanism doesn't really give me the right to judge anyone else's. Besides, I don't want to have another flashback to that witch-bitch's basement again, so..." They hear a loud, abrupt _squelch_.

From behind Rapunzel's door there's another, longer silence, until the low, tired voice of Snow's cousin asks, "Are we going to kill him afterwards?"

"Yes," Ade says, before anyone else can reply. "We're going to need to if we want to save Caterina, anyway."

Silver Bird just stands there, milling over her millions of questions while Snow and Nnedi's faces twist up as they presumably do the same.

Then both locks shine bright and break apart with a loud POP that makes Silver Bird's ears ring and the hairs on Red's everything stand up. Gretel and Rapunzel both stumble into the hallway, blinking and rubbing at the fading power in her arms. Rapunzel's face is stained with new tears, but her eyes are bright.

"All right," Snow says, clapping her hands. "Now, who exactly is Cat--" Her voice cuts off as a girl in a neat maid's uniform steps into the hallway, regarding them with a quietly blank face.

Silver Bird has enough experience with being a servant to know that even the most beaten down maids aren't supposed to look like _that_ , as if they're a corpse poured into a dress, their eyes totally unfamiliar.

She immediately knows something is wrong here, but before she can put her fingers on _what--_ or rally themselves to join the others as they charge the newcomer with fists raised and magic gleaming--the girl throws back and _screams_.

It's an inhuman scream, one that sends them all flying backwards and crashing down the hall. Silver Bird claps her hands over her ears and sees Red fold in on herself, letting out a howl which is soundless under that terrifying scream.

The screaming finally sounds when one of Nightingale's vines whips out and slices off the girl's head, causing her to collapse in on herself. Farther down the wall, two girls who are exact copies of the first round the corner and also start screaming.

Overhead, they hear pounding doors, slamming feet, and a growl building into a roar.

"Shit," Ariel mutters from the ceiling.

The Beast is frozen for a second, before punching Beauty in the face and throwing her to the floor again as he stomps out of the room. "I'll deal with you later!" he barks, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the nearby window glass.

He murmurs a quick spell, sealing an enchanted lock. It's not like she would be any real threat to him: her power is too weak, too untested, and she's his _wife_ for crying out loud, but it's better to be safe than sore.

He stomps downstairs, growling to himself that those impatient little sluts might be more trouble than he works. Before he can the cell corridor, however, he hears someone yelling over the sound of screaming maids. "Get out of here! Split up!"

Someone else replies, "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

The first voice shoots back, "Does anyone have any better ideas?" Apparently no one does, because when he finally reaches the cell block the only one's waiting for him are a heap of dead maids, lying limp and mutilated on the floor.

Such a sight should make him even angrier, but instead...the Beast's lip curls up into a rictus grin. He can hear their pounding feet, smell their sweet girl-stink and their newly acquired magic crackling through the air. Apparently the girls he'd overlooked had acquired power from one place or another, and his belly growls at the idea.

He sends his other thoughtforms melting away, not wanting the screaming maids to give the game away too quickly. Because this is a game, a hunt, a gentlemanly sport. The night is young and full of sweet prizes to win.

The Beast prowls off, humming to himself, his dark and ruined heart abuzz.

Caterina collapses on the floor, shaking. She'd failed--she hadn't distracted him long enough for the others to escape and jump him from behind, she hadn't managed _anything_.

 _No_ , she tells herself fiercely. _You were brave_ _. It's been so long since that happened that you're probably in shock because of it, but you were._ She hugs herself, feeling the baby wiggle and wondering if it's showing approval.

_And you have magic now. He's already underestimated you once tonight, and now he's given it room to happen again._

Bella closes her eyes and _reaches_ , trying to test her new strength. At first she tries to stretch her mind towards the garden, because of the rose, but all she's left with is a lingering sense that the plant has already been _claimed._

Instead she finds herself tumbling deeper, all the way down to the rotting depths of the castle crypts. She grunts with the effort, feeling her mind brush against something raw, and broken, and hungry.

 _Many_ somethings.

"Not over yet," she grunts to herself and her child and her husband, carefully levering herself into a sitting position. "Not in the least."


	16. How Roller Skates (And Zombies) Were Invented

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which pure imagination is a very effective weapon.

Gretel's taken a few steps down the hallway when it starts to _close,_ walls pressing in on them like two giant sets of teeth. She grabs Silver Bird's hand and they stagger backwards, the walls slapping together with a loud _clonk_ in front of their faces. In a moment, what was once a hall just looks like another wall.

"He's herding you," Hansel says as they stand there, panting.

"Not helping!" Gretel shoots back.

There's a loud creak and the ceiling above them yanks away, accompanied by squeals as three girls crash down on their heads. Nightingale catches herself on a tangle of vines that have suddenly sprouted from the ceiling, while Red somersaults to land neatly on her feet with Rapunzel on her arms. She sets the blond girl on the floor and waggles her swiftly regenerating fingers, while entrails dangle from her mouth.

"Fuck," Rapunzel mutters, staggering to her feet and nearly crashing into Silver Bird. "I really miss my hair. I'd _just_ mastered the physics of using it to fly and...oh, well." She huffs, licking a bit of blood that remains on her lips.

Red sucks up the entrails like spaghetti as she stands upright, looking thoughtful. "I don't the maids have as much magic as the farm boys," she says sadly. "I've been taking as many bites of them as I can and I don't think I've been getting any stronger."

"In other words," Rapunzel mutters, hands sparking fitfully, "She's chewing up everything in sight and I can't decide if it's badass or nauseating."

Gretel tugs on her braids. "Okay, okay. Does anyone know where he is?"

"Does anyone know _who_ he is, for that matter?" asks Silver Bird, patting her pockets with an expression of abject longing fro her knives. "Or what, exactly, he can do?"

Before someone can answer that very reasonable question, the ceiling pops back into existence with a snap, sending Nightingale tumbling to the floor. The other hallways close off, too, leaving them in a smooth stone box.

Gretel decides that this is a very good time to start panicking. Silver Bird must agree, because she throws up in the corner while Rapunzel winds her hands in her ragged hair and lets out a frustrated scream. Red throws herself at the nearest wall, her claws spitting sparks as they shriek against the stone, but to no avail.

Hansel's got his dead arms wrapped around Gretel as she stumbles against the wall, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. She's wondering if he'll stick around after the Beast arrives to hurt them when a tangle of torn-free vines shoot out and wrap around Red, pulling her to a gentle stop. She twists free and turns to lunge, only to stop when she sees her attacker is... "Nightingale?"

The silent girl stares at all of them, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. She hums a note of battle-song and taps one finger against her head.

"I think," Hansel muses, "she's saying that she has a plan."

"What the fuck are you wearing?" Nnedi gasps as they sprint down the hall. Or, rather, she's sprinting and Ade is rolling along on a pair of bizarre boots made of something that's not cloth or wood or metal, with grinding little wheels attached to the soles.

"I, I'm not sure," Ade pants, occasionally kicking out to propel herself forward. "I'd never be able to keep up with you on normal feet and, and I wanted to do that, so I started muttering to, to myself and--"

They round a corner and the Beast is waiting for them. Ade's never seen him before, but she recognizes the manic gleam in his eyes, the magic crackling around his arms and the hateful words dripping from his mouths. "You primitive little bitches, you're messing up my floors," he snarls. "I'll have to put a lot of effort into training you before you're suitable brides; maybe I'll just save myself the hass--"

Nnedi executes a flawless dancer's leap and punches him, one blow to the throat and the other to the face. His head snaps back, crimson gushing from his nose, but then a farm boy thoughtform appears out of nothing and grabs Nnedi by the arms. He breaks one with a single pull and throws her against the wall before she can scream. Her head slams against stone and she slides to the floor, limp and bleeding.

Ade opens her mouth, but there are no words now, no flowery sentences or desperate pleas, not even a good story to make this all go away. Instead a raw, pure note of condensed _sound_ streams out of her throat, making the still-bleeding Beast and his thoughtform stumble backwards in shocked unison.

The sound takes the form of a pale blue mist, which grows deeper and more solid before their startled eyes. Ade's feet hit the ground, her roller skates sucked away to join the essence of this emerging being. She sees a swirling tail, a thick black ponytail, muscular hands on hips, and a gentle face wearing a disapproving expression.

A jinn. Pure thoughtform, pure imagination, the central figure of the story that saved her life the night before she met Nnedi. She raises her arms, not in defense, but attack, and the jinn copies her movements.

They don't instead waste time with the farm boy. Instead, the jinn's palms glow white-hot before a blast of colorful fire sends the Beast flying, screaming, burning through several walls before finally tumbling down a staircase. His screams of pain and fury are swallowed by the dark; gone, if only for the moment. The farm boy blinks at the sight before disintegrating into nothing.

Ade drops to her knees, exhausted and trembling. She feels a cool touch at her lips and looks up to see the jinn also melting away, his face kind and understanding as he returns to her.

"No," Ade manages to gasp, crawling over to Nnedi's limp form. "Not me." The jinn nods, seeming to whisper a blessing before it begins to slide down Nnedi's throat and into her ears.

Ade clasps her beloved to her chest and gives the most fervent prayer she can: a story.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl who lost her village. She was not a princess, but she moved like one, and when she chose to speak she sounded like one. A lifetime of loss and suffering did not dim her spirit, her wisdom, her strength..."

Tiana's still getting the hang of her new body and Ariel's a tad disoriented by the shape of human buildings, so Snow leads the way as they weave through the lowest levels of the castle. "What did you mean when you mentioned going back to your father?"

"Exactly what I said," Snow murmurs as she picks a lock (she pulled those picks out of her boot sole, and apparently learned to use them from a "huntsman," whatever that means).

Ariel knows that Tiana's leery of the subject of fathers, so she's the one who asks, "The Beast knows who you are?" Snow nods stiffly; they don't know many details of her past, but they know the dark gist. "Is...did he send a message to your father?"

Snow's face goes white at the possibility just as the door clicks open. "I hope not," she mutters as she rushes into the next room--only to come to an abrupt stop, the tension slackening from her face.

They have, apparently, stumbled into the armory.

"Oh, my baby," Snow croons, rushing to cuddle her bow while Tiana looks for her sword and Ariel regards a trident propped against the back wall with interest.

As she slings her quiver over her shoulder, Snow's back straightens and her eyes grow firm. "If my father is coming," she says confidently, "I'll kill him. I was going to have to do it sooner or later, so this just makes things more convenient--"

The floor underneath their feet rattles and Tiana almost drops her sword. "What the fuck?"

"He must be messing with the stones again," Ariel mutters, clutching the trident. "Like with Red and the window, only this is an attack, not a defense mechanism."

Suddenly, there's a loud, regular scraping sound from below. They can hear it repeated over and over again, accompanied with thumping on the floor like a strange parody of marching feet.

"Does that sound like stone to you?" Snow asks quietly.

Slowly, cautiously, they emerge from the armory just in time to see the skeleton girl emerge from the basement.

"Good evening," she says sweetly, adjusting the folds of her rotting silk dress, her jawbone clicking and twitching as she speaks.

She gestures behind her, revealing a group of corpses in various states of decay huddled at the bottom of the stairs. "We're looking for our husband. Big man, very handsome, very magical, very mad. Have you seen him?"


	17. Going Green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a fiendishly clever plan is carried out with varying levels of success.

Nightingale does indeed have a plan, but it's only when everyone's looking at her that she realizes the words in her brain have, as usual, gotten jammed in her throat. She opens her mouth and nothing comes out.

She frantically tries to mime and is met with blank stares. There's no battle-song that can communicate the details of her plan, and the details are _very fucking important_ because if she miscommunicates something they could all _die_.

_Shit._

In the distance, a voice that can only be the Beast howls, making the walls of their little prison shake. "Could you...spell it out for us, maybe? Using your vines?" Gretel asks, Gretel who is as broken as she is but still manages to _speak._

She can't, she's practically operating these things on instinct and she's gotten so _used_ to living in silence, but she _needs_ her words and her words are _gone, dead_ like her children, and she's _choking..._

"Hey," Red says, wriggling free of her loosening straitjacket of vines. "It's okay. Just breath me with me okay?" She starts taking deep, exaggerated breaths, her face calmer then Nightingale has ever seen it.

Breathe. Yes, breathing. Breathing is important. Breathing is very good, except it wasn't good at _all_ at one then because if she'd stopped breathing when she in her endless sleep she wouldn't have had to wake up with flies nibbling at the crusted blood on her thighs and two babies shredding her insides...

Stop. Breathe. Look at the floor. If she thinking that or is someone saying it? She doesn't care.

Nightingale does look at the floor, because she wants to prove to herself that she is alone. She knows she is alone, she makes that very clear to herself. If she speaks cracks will form, but no one will be here to poke at those cracks and break her apart. No one is here, so there is no one to yank the words out of her mouth, bloody and bleeding ~~like her children~~.

Only she _can't_. There are no words. The words were ripped out of her with everything else.

 _But things that are ripped out can still grow back._ At least for plants, and a lot of her is plant now, isn't it? 

She feels thorns on her head quiver and twitch, alive after everything, just like her. They will protect her in her sleep, she knows. They protected her when she was silent. They will protect her when she speaks, too.

And if the thorns were gone, even if her flesh was no longer marble, she'd still be a girl who walked through hell and been led out again. And that, she knows, is no small thing.

"I," she tells the ground, blocking out the excited gasps from the girls around her. "I h-have. A. Plan."

When the world doesn't explode she risks a quick glance up at a joyful Red. "I'll need some of your blood. And...maybe another finger. Or more."

The Beast has managed to heal himself, although he can't quite get the smoke out of his hair. He stalks back to the hallway where those two dusky bitches were with dark things on his mind, but they're long gone and he can't get a lock on their location.

Growling, he decides to check some of his traps. One of them appears to have caught a prize of some sort, so hopefully he'll be replenish himself for getting back to a chase that no longer feels like a game.

He approaches the stone cube that used to be a hallway, waving a hand to make a door appear in the closet hall. The Beast swaggers through to find himself in the middle of a...forest.

Not quite, a forest, he realizes as he staggers backwards, but a massive web of vines. They cover the walls, hang dangle in ceiling, rise in massive piles from the floor, dangles from the ceiling in heavy curtains. There are girls here, lost in the scrum, but he can't _see_ them and the heavy amounts of power crackling in the air choke his other senses.

He doesn't care, though, because somewhere in this room is a _feast_ , and all he has to do is hack through this mess to find her. This hunt looks like it might be fun again.

Most of the vines don't have thorns, but some of them do, and they hurtle straight at him like Beauty's fucking rose. He disintegrates them with a casual wave of his hand, only getting distracted for a second--but a second is all Rapunzel needs to lunge out of the greenery and send an electric blast crackling down his back.

He lurches forward, hissing, and a wolf-girl drops down from the ceiling to drive her claws into his face. A blast of magic sends her flying back before she can connect, although the vines catch her before he can fall.

The Beast snaps his fingers, cutting off the air to Rapunzel's lungs and sending her crashing to her knees. He looms over like a disappointed schoolmaster, snarling, "Just what you think you're doing, you nasty little creature?"

A vine whips at his head, and when he tries to twist away another slices off his ear.

"Distracting you," Rapunzel gasps, snatching back her breath while the Beast howls in pain (again).

A girl with blond braids darts out of nowhere and grabs the ear out of the air. He spits acid, sending her tumbling off balance, before sending her crashing to the ground with a fierce backhand. "GRETEL!" Rapunzel screams, but Gretel can't hear her over the ringing in her head and Hansel's desperate cries.

His ear skitters across the ground and he stomps toward it, muttering "I am going to rip out your _cunts_ , you backward bitches..." He's so lost in his rant that he doesn't see the brown-skinned girl until she snatches up the ear and jams it into her mouth with a final _crunch,_ sending blood spilling down her throat.

The Beast shrieks with enough rage to send tear vines off the walls and make the others girls press their hands to their ears, crying out in pain. He launches towards the little forest slut, fingers shifting into claws because this is the kind of insult that can only be overcome with physical violence. His hand wraps around her throat and digs into...metal.

Metal, because now a suit of armor is flowing into life around the girl's slender body. It's bright and flexible in a way that still steel can only dream of, wrapping fluidly around her curves without hugging them.

Their eyes lock--the girl looks almost as shocked as he feels, but her eyes still gleam with a fierce triumph. He growls and flings her across the room, only for great butterfly-shaped _wings_ to sprout from her armor's back catch her before she hits the far wall. She hovers in midair, blades sprouting from each of her gauntlets, and flaps frantically as she tries to figure out how to move.

The Beast stalks towards her, hand clutching into a fist as he prepares to heat that ridiculous armor to boiling temperature, only to come to a stop when he sees something that's totally bizarre, even for _him_.

Enough of the vines have been torn away from all the fighting to reveal a girl sitting in the middle of the prison, on top of some of chair made entirely from moss. Vines stream from her skull, her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her fingers, her feet, even from her breasts and between her legs. She's almost completely covered, but he can still make out pale, vulnerable flesh.

He smiles, and the smile reveals too many teeth.

They all rush at him, screaming, but none of them are fast enough the Beast from reaching out and ripping a whole tangled mass of organs out of the girl's chest. He unhinges the jaw until it reaches his ribcage and crams the whole dripping mass into his mouth.

All over the castle, they hear the Beast's triumphant scream in their heads as he's rocked by a fresh wave of power. In the room itself, the others fall to their knees, clutching their heads. Their have to scramble, weeping, for the door just to get away from the terrible crushing _noise_.

 _I can hear you,_ he roars, the words ringing through all of their skulls as blood streams from Red's sensitive ears and the zombie wives collapse to their knees, bawling while Ariel crashes to the floor. _I can hear you and I can find you and I am going to hurt you, oh the things I am going to do you should just kill yourselves to escape the pain you ungrateful little_

Wait.

He can, indeed, feel all of them. And he can feel that a life that should be snuffed out, should be _gone_ , should be a walking corpse at best and a helpless ghost at worst, is...

"Hello."

The Beast turns as the vines behind shift and wrap together, forming into the body of a girl. She orchids for hair and tea roses for eyes; her flesh is the kind of green that burns.

Eating Red's finger hadn't been enough for a spell of this magnitude, of course. Nightingale had poured her very soul into the magic, quietly hoping that she'd be able to find her way back. Now, that was no longer an option.

Oh, well. She'd never liked that body much anyway. And through this new mouth, with lips made of bright amber leaves, words flow with ease.

"You want to hurt us?" she asks, and her voice is the soft rush of wind in grass combined with the defiant rumble of falling trees. "Well, we want to hurt you."

She snaps her fingers, and every single remaining vine in the room crashes down on the Beast's head.

When he finally burns himself free, they're long gone.


	18. The League of Undead Gentlewomen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the enchanted apple finally makes an appearance.

The remains of the Beast's potion had long since dribbled away into the grains of the wood floor. It hadn't been triggered Caterina into giving birth.

Raising the dead, however, had.

Her contractions were still far apart, but she was lying on the floor sobbing for air nonetheless because she had just turned herself into a _necromancer_ and her husband was running around trying to use his incredible power to _kill_ everyone and she could still hear his voice ringing in her _head_ and god damn it she was still _hungry_. 

"Deep breaths," she told herself, hugging her stomach. She took deep, exaggerated breaths the way she'd read about in books, and tried to remember which position was suitable for giving birth. On her back? Sitting up? Dare she try and haul herself into a tub?

The door banged open and Caterina screamed, very nearly shitting herself.

"Sorry, sorry! It's just us!" There was Ade, holding up her hands in surrender as dove feathers spewed from her lips. "We told you that we'd come back, remember." Before Caterina could reply, Ade girl stepped inside to let a walking corpse into the room.

And another.

And another.

And another, until there were four dead women crowded in the room, while three more clustered around the doorway. The oldest was little more than a tangle of bones, while the youngest was streaked in crusted blood from gaping wounds that nearly looked fresh.

The Beast went through wives very quickly indeed.

Curiously, they didn't smell that bad to Caterina, although she could glimpse five living girls in the her room's antechamber who were wrinkling their noses.

"My name is Giselle," said one of the older corpses, dropping down by Caterina's side. Her voice sounded like bastard child of birdsong and opening coffins. "Will you let us help you?"

Caterina blinked. They were dead, yes, but there seemed to be an air of goodwill in their sockets. Besides, one of the girls was bouncing a cooing baby skeleton on her hip, so they obviously

"Thank you," she breathed, allowing herself to be gently lifted from the floor and placed on the bed. She stiffened slightly, remembering all the things that had happened in this bed, but a girl with moldy green skin squeezed her hand and gave her a gentle smile.

As she gasped at another contraction, Caterina could hear Giselle say: "Our husband will come for her sooner or later, living girls. If you want him dead as much as we do all you have to do is wait."

Caterina leaned back with a sight, letting her fear lessen ever so slightly with the comfort of no longer being alone. A pair of bare teeth pressed briefly down on her forehead, and they felt gentler than a kiss from any pair of lips.

"Tell me your names," she says suddenly. "All of your names. No matter what happens tonight, I want to remember."

"So..." Snow asked.

"So," Nnedi replied.

They'd regrouped with Nnedi and Ade while leading the troop of dead girls to find Caterina, the closest they could get to getting a lock on the Beast's location. Nobody had been in much mood to talk, what with the herd of zombies on their heels (very polite and sophisticated zombies, but still).

Now, however, they stand in awkward silence in the antechamber to Caterina's room's chambers, listening to her muffled gasps and groans. Outside, several zombies stand guard per Giselle's orders, all waiting for a homicidal sorcerer to try and kill them.

It doesn't seem like there will be any better time to talk about the things that had changed in the rather short amount of time since they had separated. And things had definitely changed.

For example, dots of silver and gold now move over Nnedi's skin, a gently teasing light show that makes her look a living meteor shower. Her eyes look the same, but when she turned a corner and nearly crashed into Tiana, a concentrated blast of pure light shot from those eyes and burned a smoking hole in a wall.

The hallway got a little crowded as they were running to Caterina's room, so Nnedi reversed her personal gravity and ended up sprinting across the ceiling the ceiling alongside Ariel, her hair just brushing the top of Ade's head. Nnedi's not quite sure how she pulled that off, or how she got, only that while she was doing it felt like the most normal thing.

Ade exclaims about the thought-genie that healed Nnedi's wounds (spraying a few leaves across the floor as she talks, but only a few), which leads into a deeper discussion about the benefits of eating farm boys. By the time they're done, Snow's eyes are wide with wonder.

"How come the Beast isn't dead already?" she asks suddenly. "If you can all do these things..."

"He's been amassing power for years," says one of the dead girls, making them letting out some very unheroic squeaks when she suddenly appeared at the antechamber door. "Sorry. I heard you talking and..." she winces, rubbing the gaping hole in her torso. "He's beaten some very experienced magic users and that makes it confident--overly confident, I hope. We have the advantage in numbers, but not much else."

"So if we eat _him_ ," Tiana says thoughtfully, "or bits of him, at least, we'll have a chance at countering him."

"Precisely," says an unfamiliar voice, and their heads all snap around in the _other_ direction. Snow draws her bow, Tiana and Ade go for their swords, Nnedi's eyes light up, and Ariel makes an awkward dive--only to twist around and crash trident-first into the wall before she could take off Nightingale's head.

"Christ," Tiana mutters as she goes to help Ariel tug her trident free. "We've gotten _paranoid._ "

Snow stares at Nightingale, the owner of that familiar voice, as she leads the other girls through the mass of zombies and into the antechamber. "You can talk."

"Yes."

"You're made of plants."

"Yes."

"And I can fly--some what." Silver Bird mutters as she hoves into view, wings bumping against a wall. Ariel gives her a sympathetic look.

"Oh, we've had so much _fun!"_ Red cries, skipping forwards. "Silver ate the asshole's ear, and you can _see_ Rapunzel's hair getting longer, and--oh, are you dead?" She smiles and sticks out her hand to the dead girl in the doorway. "That's so _cool!_ I'm Red, what's your name?"

"Marianne," says the girl, blinking her ragged eyelids, because Red was the kind of person who could knock even the undead off balance.

"Those are zombies, right?" Gretel asks. "You all can see them?"

"Yes, they are," says Silver Bird, dropping down to Gretel's side with a soothing expression. "Everything's real, except..." Her face twists in thought, " _maybe_ your brother."

"Oh, okay," says Gretel. Hansel leans against the wall, invisible as always, and mutters "Told you so." Gretel sticks out her tongue at him.

Rapunzel doesn't say anything. Her eyes are closed, her face narrowed in a look of concentration, and her hair is rapidly spilling down her shoulders. This is the closest chance at emotional stability she's gotten since her mother died, and she's going to take every second of it she can to work her magic.

As the others chatter and spin their plans of attack, Nightingale steps forward and extends a hand to Snow. A large red apple has sprouted from her palm, redder than blood and brighter than fire. "Eat, please."

"Are...are you sure?" Snow asks.

"I just had my organs ripped out--don't ask. I can stand to be plucked." Her flowery eyes bore into Snow, wise and kind as they have always been. "Besides, you're the only left who doesn't have magic yet, and he's closing in on his fast. We need all the power we can get." Snow swallows, nodding, and takes the apple with a soft _pop._

For a moment, she just stares at it, wondering if she should even bother. This isn't the type of a monster you can kill quickly; standing and fighting might just get them all killed--or worse.

But whatever happens tonight, it won't be at her father's hand. And even if she no longer believes in things always turning out right in the end, Snow has seen enough on this strange, beautiful journey--not to mention tonight--to accept the possibility miracles.

So she takes a bite.

It tastes like an apple, and it's almost frightening as the tingle she feels in her blood. She keeps chewing, praying that Nightingale knows what she's doing.

When she hears pounding feet coming towards them, accompanied by a slowly building roar, Snow eats even faster. Juice runs down her chin, feeling hotter than blood.

Eventually, she has to stick the apple in her mouth and keeping eating as best she can while wiping her hands on her pants and shrining her bow. Only her fingers are tingling strangely as she works, and when she looks down she sees them _warp_ in a way decent fingers don't do.

The magic builds and explodes in her head, sending Snow crashing to her knees as the last of the apple pops out of her mouth.

Before anyone can help her, the Beast arrives.


	19. The Value Of Losing One's Shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the final battle finally takes places, even though "final" is a breathtakingly relative term, and shit goes down.

The Beast's plan is to charge down the hallway, forcing the bitches to attack him one by one. When the first zombie charges at him, teeth bared (the Beast isn't exactly sure how all his ex-wives have escaped from their crypts, but he appreciated the opportunity to kill them again) he disintegrated her without breaking stride and strode on to the next one.

But then the black girl with glowing eyes, who he'd _sworn_ would be dead by now, shoves her hands _through_ the nearest wall and throws her head back with a piercing scream. A ripple of fresh power shoots through the stone, shattering old spells. The Beast isn't prepared to fight for control of the castle walls, hasn't thought any of these children would even _think_ of taking them from him.

The walls let out a boneshaking _rumble_ and _groan_ as they ffallll away, before sending everyone to their knees as they hit into the floor with an almighty _crash_. The Beast waves his hand irritably, driving away the clouds of dust, and finds himself standing in a room much longer and wider than it should have been. Not to mention that the ceiling has quite simple disappeared, leaving them all bathed in bright white light from above.

At the far end stands the door to his wife's room, and all of the bitches are gathering in front of it, glaring at him with weapons raised and magical fury sparkling. The cunt who'd destroyed his walls staggers out of sight in a state of total exhaustion, a writhing Princess Olga slung over her shoulder for some reason, but the rest hold their ground and glare.

And if _that_ isn't enough, a cloud of ashes suddenly shoots up from the zombie's disintegrated remains and wraps around the Beast's head, shrieking all the invectives she had been too well-bred to use as either a human or a member of the undead. He grunts and shoves it away with an unnatural blast of wind.

They want a battlefield, then? He'll give them a battle worthy of one. He snaps his fingers and farm boys step out of nothing on either side of him, only now they're wearing glittering suits of armor and wielding identical swords. Now they're _knights_ , and they have monsters to slay.

(The Beast is very impressed with these knights, and if it isn't so bloody tiring to make them he would he us them all the time. Still, he didn't think he'd have to keep up the spell for long).

"I've laid powers that you whores couldn't comprehend to waste, he growls, voice ringing across the battlefield. "But," and now his voice is gentle, sophisticated, because he is a _prince_ after all, "If you submit with grace and and release my family, I will spare your lives and offer you a chance at redemption."

"Funny," says the girl dressed in metal, wings glittering in the moonlight, "We were about to offer you something similar."

 _"She_ was," adds the bitch who was covered in fur, "I just want to eat your heart with a side of raspberries."

The Beast smirks and draws a sword of pure magic from the air, because every hero needs a good sword to save the day. And he is the hero, isn't he? He's the one going to save his wife and child from deranged abominations (the fact that he's probably going to kill his wife afterwards, and maybe the child too, is a moot point).

He gives a beautiful smile, and charges into battle.

Everyone loses their shit.

This is not a time for calm heroics, after all. This is a time for fighting and completely panicking when you considered the terrible things that would happen to you if you lost, and thinking about those terrible things often triggered memories of the terrible things that had happened in the past.

The living girls have already experienced battle (although never on this scale) and the dead girls have already experienced death. This doesn't make them any less scared, however, because just because you are familiar with a bad thing doesn't make it any less frightening to face it again.

There are flashbacks that trigger battle rages. There are screams of pain. There is confusion, there is the very unpleasant experience of trying to masters one's new superpowers in high-stress situations, there is a deep urge in each and every heart there to run at one point or another.

But they don't, because there was nowhere to run and they have innocent lives to protect. And mostly because they are very, very angry, and find beating up mindless monsters cathartic.

Silver Bird twirls through the air, dodging fireballs and chopping off knights' heads from above. Focusing on what she's actually doing just makes it harder, so she has decided to concentrate on the graceful movements of butterflies: butterflies in her mother's hair, butterflies burning in her stepmother's fire, butterflies watching her as she awoke in the woods beyond her home for the first time. Then she thinks of herself as a butterfly, one made of sharp edges and burning fear. It worked surprisingly well.

Ariel swoops and dodges through the air, jabbing with her trident. Her movements are still a little awkward, but Tiana is always there, covering her tail, and Ariel is always in a decent position to watch the other girl's back.

Also, they discover rather suddenly that Tiana can turn into a frog when someone is swinging a sword at her head and hop behind him before turning human again and stabbing him in the back, so that's very cool.

Red eats and eats and eats, laughing because all the bloodshed reminded her of killing the has who killed her grandmother, and cries because all the bloodshed reminds her of the day her grandmother died. She grows and grows and grows until she was seven feet tall, and the Beast had to practically bury her under endless layers of knights. At one point he manages to rip off her arm, and Red just laughs and sprouted a new one.

Gretel snaps her fingers and knights sizzle inside their armor. If Hansel says anything, she'd doesn't hear him. She doesn't have time for his voice, and she doesn't need her to tell her what she has to do. (He would have been very happy to hear that).

Nightingale walks through the crowd, singing softly to herself as her vines twist and ripple around her, tearing through knights like sheaves of wheat. Beast sometimes gets a telekinetic grip on her and she'll twist herself free; he'll set her on fire and she'll simply pull off the burning bits before growing new ones.

With every step Rapunzel takes, with every neck she breaks and every eyeball she rips out and swallows, her hair grows longer. It's a darker gold than before, forming a pulsing web instead of a smooth mane. It is hair designed to dominate, to devour.

Ade rides through the crowd on a rainbow unicorn, swinging a sword with one hand and firing a mysterious metal object that spits white-hot pieces of lead with the other, because she had started talking to herself about victory and this is what appeared.

When Nnedi rejoins the battle, she twists her lower half into a hurricane and flies through the crowd, blasting laser fire everywhere she looked.

In her bed, Beauty pushes and pushes her baby out of her body, while her mind fights to push and push and keep the zombies from falling apart. The dead girls have no powers except for bone-crushing strength and a brutal thirst for vengeance, and they didn't need anything else.

Soon the floorboards of the room ran red with blood, and the air vibrated with screams. The Beast finally gives up on thoughtforms when their heaped bodies started impeding his own movement, letting the girls all rush him at once, only for them to discover something strange:

They can't take him down.

Whenever one hits him, it only because he's busy slicing another's arm open or sending someone crashing to the floor. Every wound they makes heals almost instantly before they can make another. They rip pieces off of him, burn him, electrocute him and shoot him full of poison, but he heals so fast before giving it back a hundredfold.

They are angry, and battle-hardened, and desperate, and clever, and each magnificent in their own right, but he is swollen like a tick from years of amassing power and has mastered spells that even Rapunzel and Gretel have never even heard of. The zombies take the worst of his magic, but even they are melting away into truly nothing at a terrifying speed.

Bones are broken, faces blooded, skulls rocked with concussions. And...eventually the Beast is swaying on his feet, almost completely drained of power. He's been forced to use so much magic that he's had shift back into his old hairy form. He's missing big chunks of himself that he can't regrow.

If any of them had been able to muster a final blow, they would have finished him easily. The problem was...none of them can.

Nnedi's tornado is blown apart and she lies curled in a ball, holding her broken ribs as she struggles to get up. Silver Bird is finally caught in a fire blast and ejects herself from the armor to land on the floor hard, screaming and thrashing in the depths of her memories. Ade crawls from the remains of her unicorn, clutching a broken leg. Gretel is hit with a curse that turns Hansel into a monster in her head, screaming with rage and clawing at her, sending her crashing to her knees as she fight to seize control of her own mind.

Ariel collapses in on herself, holding her guts, while Tiana huddles over her making inhuman sounds of pain and fear. Rapunzel lies seizing on the ground, spitting and bleeding, racked by toxins that make her hair go limp and shrivel. Nightingale screames as she was finally torn apart, leaves frantically flying around the room as they try to weave back together before they blow apart for good.

Red fights the longest, the hardest, and finally he has to pin her to a wall with his sword. She hisses and writhes, her skin bubbling as it heals and is hurt over and over again.

They are all still alive, still fighting, but for any outside observer the battle was over.

The Beast pauses to rip the final zombie in half before crushing the ashes of the rest into a limp, useless little lump. He munches on the still-quivering torso as he makes his way towards his wife's door, feeling his power slowly returning and his lovely human form returning.

Perhaps, he thinks, he could bring the bitches back after he had disposed of his wife, send them off to the afterlife more slowly. The thought makes him smile, bearing dagger-sharp teeth.

Everything is going to be fine.

In Beauty's room, Snow wakes up and discovers that magic has turned her into a mirror like no other.


	20. The Value Of A Good Diet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things get very weird and meta, and the author apologizes in advance for any confusion.

Snow wakes up, and everything...it doesn't hurt, exactly, but it tingles. In the distance, she can hear roaring fire and agonized screams, accompanied by the sound of big feet drawing near.

For a moment, she's too afraid to move, but then she forces herself to sit up and as she looks down at herself she almost forgets the Beast for a second.

The apple has turned her skin into a strange, reflective substance, stronger than glass and more fluid than Crystal. In it, she can see the room reflected, warped and distorted. But she can also see see another room: her mother's room, with a woman and a girl sitting in front of a mirror as they plan for the future. And there are flashes of forest trees, dead men, the huntsman's smile and Red's bright eyes. Glimpses of Snow's story are refracted across her body, dizzying and endless.

Unable to stare for too long, she twists her gaze away and lurches to her feet. Giselle and the girl with the dead baby--Eleanor, Snow thinks her name is--stand by Caterina's bed, whispering encouragement.

Caterina herself stares at the ceiling, sweat trickling down her face. "They're gone," she murmurs. "The other dead girls--they're gone, back to the afterlife. I--I couldn't hold to them." A tear trickles down her face. "We're losing."

And before anyone can think of something to say to that, the door crashes open and the Beast stands there. Healed again, tall again, beautiful again, blood dripping from his mouth as he tosses a zombie torso away. "Good evening, ladies," he says.

Snow fires an arrow at his skull while the remaining dead girls lunge at him, claws bared. He crushes the zombies into nothing and sends the arrow hurtling back at Snow's head, forcing her to leap to the side. She trips over Caterina's headboard, crashing on to bed beside the other girl to twin yelps, and as their skin touches...

They _merge_ , slipping together so fast and painlessly that they almost don't notice until they stand up from the bed. Two--three, if you count the baby--have become one. Mixed in with the flashes of Snow's life on their glittering skin are reflections from Caterina's: her sister's face, her mother's grave, her wedding day and all the horrors that followed.

Their thoughts are mixed--there is confusion and fear, but not panic. It feels _right_ that they should be mixed this way, at least for a little while.

And a little while may be all they have, because the Beast staggers backward with a look of confusion that shifts to rage as he lunges.

The skills Snow has gained in her battles against bandits combines with Caterina's intimate knowledge of her many movements allow them to dodge out of his grip and dash past past, a disintegration spell whining harmlessly off their skin. They stagger onto the battlefield and trip over Rapunzel--or start to, because before they can fall down Rapunzel _merges_ with them. Their skills, their thoughts, mix and grow in a bright hungry mass inside their heads.

By now they know what to do. They race from girl to girl (Nightingale's leaves flurry onto their skin in understanding), until there are so many stories reflected in the skin-mirror that it looks more like a tapestry of thoughts.

You can see Snow's drawn bow, the monsters crowding into Red's grandmother's house, the flickering firelight from Silver Bird's kitchen, the depths of Ariel's beautiful ocean kingdom, the view from inside Tiana's well, the limp bodies of Nightingale's children, Hansel leading Gretel by the hand, Nnedi's village in flames, the sultan choking around Ade's knife, Rapunzel's mother singing over a spell, the wrinkled pages of one of Catherine's favorite books, and so much more. You can see hopes and dreams and fears and traumas.

Because that has always been Snow's power, hasn't it? Long before she ate the apple, she had the power to seek out other stories and weave them with her own.

Just as Caterina's power has always been to revive the secret things that others tried to bury, in herself or in others. Just as Gretel's power was to face the fire and come out unscathed, just as Rapunzel's was to grow beyond tragedy, just as Tiana's was to seek the form she needed rather than the one she was given, just as Nnedi's was to perform the impossible when it was needed most, whether escaping a palace or starting a tornado. Just it was for all of them.

When they have all been absorbed as a unit, they stand, staggering and gasping with pain as they do so. Because merging into a single being has a price, of course. It means taking in everyone's trauma, everyone pain from present and past, all the demons real and imagined. They tremble for a second, and for a moment they almost fall.

But they don't, because they can face the bad things together, just as they always have. They are growing strong, and they are growing bigger, too--their head is rising up towards the moon, and they show no signs of stopping.

The Beast approaches them, and for a moment he hesitates, because they are so much larger than he is. But than he lunges, because if nothing else he is brave. He is broken as much as the girls are, and driven by uncontrollable madness, and if this was another story he might be the hero. He might have a chance to heal.

He fears redemption more than he fears death, though, so he instead he slams into them with claws of burning fire. They scream in pain, knocked off balance, and Beast and Merged Being both tumble out of the shaking, burning, castle.

They crash to the forest floor and the Beast tumbles off, silver blood dripping from his mouth as he rolls back to his feet. He is ready to absorb their power, to indulge in the biggest feast any wizard could dream of.

They rise slowly, painfully, to their feet.

Or, rather, _we_ do.

It is _we_ , not _they_ , because in this heightened state of consciousness we recognize, at least for a moment, what we are. We are girls (and gender fluid mermaids) from dark versions of famous stories whose fates have been gathered in a powerful knot, just as it says in the summary.

We are refugees, runaway daughters of the Brothers Grimm and the Great God Disney. We were stolen from our first creators so we could be dipped in a young nobody's overactive, blood-soaked imagination. We took her scattered ideas and ran with them, creating characters and events that no one ever suspected possible, not even our so-called author.

We are not real, but we are based on real pains and inspired by the real struggles of entire classes of people. We are reflections of the LGBTQIA, the victims of abuse, the mentally ill, the disabled, and we are pale, pitiful reflections of all the real-life struggles of all those heroic people. These are the people who face true Beasts every day with far worse odds, and while it is impossible to fully communicate the depths of their struggles we do what we can to honor their sacrifice. 

We are many versions of the same idea merged into one: the ideal of small, broken characters being able to level up their skills and face big, brutal forces. This is the dream of every civil rights movement, every outsider standing up to bullies, every social justice soldier, every abused child walking out the door.

And as we turn to face the Beast, we realize where our power comes from. Not from the remains of our enemies, or even the ink on the screen, those are just vehicles. Our power comes from you, the reader.

You, wherever you are and whatever your identity and whenever you are reading this, whether you have been for the beginning or stumbled upon us far in the future. You, who are probably confused as hell by this point, perhaps waiting for us to get back to the fucking fight scene already. You, who have noticed all the flaws in this writing that we might never notice. You, who are here anyway, who believes in the truths we tell and might even be grateful to us for saying them.

We charge the Beast, and you are our shield against the full might of his power. We stumble, we smoke, we scream in pain, but we are drawing deep from the endless immortality of stories and we do not fall.

Clap your hands if you believe in fairies. Say a prayer if you believe in a Goddess or God. Scroll down if you want to give us a happy ending.

(No beta, we die like men)

You believe in us, because our power makes us pure story, and as a reader know what stories can do. Stories can protect a dream, tell a secret, open a heart or mind. The very act of reading means that you are feeding our magic with your faith right here, right now.

We throw our own power back at the Beast, sending him swaying under the weight of vines and hair and claws and fire and lightning and every weapon imaginable. He staggers and lets out a furious row, but he stands too, because you are also giving your faith to him. After all, you want a good story, and what is a good story without a villain?

The Beast and us draw closer and closer, until we are close enough to kiss or bite. He snarls some bitter insult that we don't care about; although you would if you heard it, because it is undeniably targeted to somebody like you.

We are so big now. The Beast was a tick, but we are a vampire: weird, impossible, sometimes beautiful and always terrifying.

"Now what?" you wonder, and we respond by grabbing the Beast by the waist and shoving him into our mouth.

Rings and swords are such overused power-ups, don't you think?

He screams, muffled by our unhinging jaw and the roof of our mouth, which is brighter than crystal and harder than iron. The personification of the story's merged heroes eats the personification of the story's villain, and his taste is wonderfully bitter in our throat. We chew his flesh and drinking his blood, smiling a little.

He burns our insides with his magic and we fall over groaning, but we keep chewing and we keep breathing. You're still here, after all, watching us, and we have to keep up the show for you.

We shove him in, deeper and deeper. Bones crunch and organs pop as his struggles slowly die down. We gorge ourselves on his magic until we can't eat anymore, and we never be able to eat any magic again (we are not addicted, thank God, we will not have a new monster to face).

We glow with power, the power of computer screens and sunlight on pages and eyes lighting up with a new idea, the greatest power of all. The Beast dies, and his strength becomes ours. His pain, too, and bright tears rushing down our face as we wonder what could have been, if someone could have saved him before he became a monster.

And than we break apart, and as we do "we" becomes "they." We--they--we--they--the cast of characters has enough issues without knowing they are being watched, after all. Besides, reader-character relationships are one of the few symbiotic relationships that can survive despite the total obliviousness of the latter.

They lie there on the grass, panting, absorbing the Beast's goneness and this strange sort-of-ending to their quest. Snow lies still, breathing quietly as the mirrors drain from her skin and she looks like a girl again, from a distance.

The only sound is Caterina's baby crying in her arms as she cleans it--her--vigorously with her skirt, because when she tumbled out of Snow she somehow had the baby with her. There will be some debates later about whether Caterina's daughter is now technically everybody else's as well, since she emerged from their merged bodies, but for now that is a moot point.

Our cast of characters lies on the bloodstained grass, silent and thoughtful.

And than, because every English teacher you had in high school has reminded you that a climax is not the end of the story, someone (Tiana) finally asks, "Now what?"


	21. And They Burned Brightly Ever After

They fly back to Rapunzel's tower on magic feet and rest for a long while. It turns out the tower can hold most of them, and they add new rooms where necessary. They hold a funeral for Rapunzel's mother, and Snow holds her cousin as she cries.

Any physical injuries were healed by the merging, but the girls have all been exhausted and psychologically battered by their various psychological ideals. For a time they just want to...be, looking after each other and exploring their own interests. For food they hunt, gather, or eat the plants grown by Nightingale. At one point, Silver Bird flies back to the Beast's castle and salvages some of the his books, a gesture for which they are all grateful. 

They read, they write, they draw, they share stories and develop romances. The ones who have partners fuck quite a bit. They also spend some time testing their new magical abilities, which have grown much stronger and more elaborate since they devoured the Beast. 

Caterina names her daughter Sky--after something that changes constantly and holds hidden depths, that is limitless and unkillable. She reads to Sky every day, and is grateful for the endless diapers that Ade speaks into being. 

Caterina has also taken time to mark down the names of all the Beast's wives who sacrificed their second lives to save them: Giselle, Eleanor, Eleanor's daughter Violet, Marianne, Henrietta, and Lydia. Rapunzel, a talented and hardworking artist, draws her recollection of their beautiful, rotting faces and hangs them in the main hall, all carefully labeled, a gallery of heroes.

And they live, in peace and contentment. Sometimes they fight, as family does, but the bonds of what they've been through and their need for each stays long.

It doesn't last, of course.

Because many of these girls have unfinished business in the outer world, and when they are ready to start up new quests, they do.

The gardener's boy carefully prunes the roses, the wind ruffling his golden hair. He finds himself waiting, as he sometimes does, for a pair of strong arms to swoop around him as he works and the huntsman's surprisingly soft lips to kiss his ear. The memories are sharp-edged and sweet in equal measure, so he tries to shake them away without much success.

"Hello."

He turns to see a girl with long black hair in a braid down her back and a bow in her hand, a pack and quiver of arrows slung over her shoulders. She wears men's clothes, although they different from the ones she was wearing the night the huntsman kissed him goodbye before leading her into the woods. She's more muscled than before, taller and tanned, but he still recognizes his former princess.

"He didn't make it, did he?" says the gardener's boy quietly. He had expected this, when the huntsman didn't come back, but seeing the confirmation in Snow's eyes still makes his heart silently break into a million pieces.

"I'm so sorry," she says, pulling him into a hug. "I...I know it's no consolation, but he died like a hero, thinking of you."

For a moment they stand there, the gardener's boy sobbing quietly as Snow's tears silently drip into his hair.

When he finally pulls away, he sniffs a few times before saying, quietly, "I...thank you for telling me that." He sighs, rubbing his eyes. "I think the...closure helps, a little. I think I'll be able to move on, eventually.

She nods, a sad smile dancing on her lips. "Perhaps you'll find new opportunities for love once the court has to relocate to the palace of my father's little brother."

"What?" He's confused, but then he remembers why she left, and what her father has done. Wherever she's been, it's finally given her the tools she needs to face him. "You...you didn't just come back here for me, did you?"

"No." She bows her head and starts walking towards the palace steps. Her fingers twitch, and he can hear the castle stones rattle. "I'm here to break the walls and sing the guards to sleep. I'm here to slowly fill my father full of arrows until there's no power on Earth that can keep his heart beating."

And that is what she does.

"She's in a brothel," Nnedi says, eyes glowing while she tracks her sister's location. Her face darkens as Ade's carpet soars high above the desert sands, the wind ruffling their hair. "She always was the prettier twin."

"I'm sorry," says Ade. The words don't cause an apple to fall out of her mouth and she doesn't have to talk constantly to keep the carpet moving; they've both put particularly effort into finessing their powers in preparation for this mission.

Nnedi nods, hugging herself. "It'll be...hard. She'll be marked in more ways than we can see. She'll probably be in for a bit of culture shock, too." She sighs. "I guess we'll just have to take it, one day at a time."

Ade takes a breath, forcing herself to ask the question. "Do you think she'll accept this? Us, I mean?"

Nnedi nods firmly. "She will. If any of my memories about her are right, she will. Only..." she frowns. "What we do with the other girls in the brothel? What if they want to go, too?"

Ade stares. "You're saying, what, we take them all back to the tower with us?"

Nnedi shrugs. "Or at least give them the magic they need to find their own way home." She twirls a miniature lightning storm around her fingers. "Killing the Beast gave us so much power, practically unlimited...."

Ade finishes for her, face lighting with understanding. "...Maybe we can get away with sharing a little."

As they scale the walls of the castle (well, Tiana scales and Ariel swim over the stone) Tiana isn't sure if she wants to just to do this. In fact, she thinks she might just turn off her stickiness and let herself spatter on the forest floor.

"Can't we visit your folks first?" she asks. A guard passes by a window, but the spell they've woven together prevents him from hearing any noise.

"Your father's castle are closer," Ariel points out. "Besides, the sooner we get this over with the better."

Tiana huffs. "I know. It's just...Alex is still a kid, and this is a lot to burden him with."

"But he knows, doesn't he? He's seen you in dresses and your mother's makeup and everything."

Tiana raises an eyebrow. "This is a pretty big leap beyond that," she points out, glancing down at her still rather new breasts.

"He's a kid, like you said. There're resilient, and they haven't been taught to fear the unknown yet."

Tiana thinks that she can see Alex's window when Ariel asks. "Are you going to kill your father? For what he did to you?"

Tiana shrugs. "I don't know. Are you going to kill the prince?"

Ariel shakes her head. "No, I don't think so. I wanted to kill him for a while, but now...." She sighs. "He was old enough to know how to fear strange things and but far too young to want to understand them. If I tried to go scare some empathy into him or something, I'd probably just make it worse. Besides, I really want to see my family and let them know I'm alive. Not to mention punching that witch in the noise and screwing me over, before..." she looks at Tiana was a smile. "Thank her for the unexpected gifts." Tiana blushes.

"But you didn't answer my question," April presses. "Are you going to kill your father? Because he's not like my prince at all; you were his child, he knew you, and he was old enough to know better."

Tiana sighs, rubbing her head. "I want to, I really do. But if I killed him, than Alex would be a target for every conniving backstabber in the realm--not to mention foreign forces. Of course, if Alex wants to come back with us he can, but I don't think he will. He loves our mother and she loves him. She loved me, too, before..." She shivers, even though it's warm.

Then her head lifts and her jaw tightens. "What matters is finding out how he's been treating Alex," Tiana growled. "He used to beat me sometimes, back when I was his son. If it's gotten worse since then...I'll do what is necessary."

April nods, and they slip in through Alex's window together. Tiana's little brother sits up with a groan as their feet creak across the floor. "Whaaaa?" Tiana lights out a candle, and his eyes grow wide.

He gasps out a name that's no longer hers, only to trail off in shock when he sees what Tiana has become, and the mermaid swinging her legs on the sill.

Tiana smiles. "Hi, squirt." She gestures to herself and Ariel. "I found some magic, just like I said I would."

For a moment he simply gapes and Tiana keeps smiling, keeps holding up a good front as she feels her heart rocket towards a precipice....

And than Alex leans forward, slowly and carefully, before wrapping her arms around her waist. His grip is gentle at first, but grows tighter and tighter until it feels like he's never going to let go.

Someone lights the candles in the stepmother's bedroom and she sits up, groaning. She rubs her eyes and blinks, expecting to see the regular servant...but instead there's a blond girl she's never seen before sitting by her bed, wagging her fingers to make the candle flames dance.

"Who are you?" the stepmother gasps, scrabbling backward and almost falling off the bed. "What are you doing here?"

"Hm?" asks Gretel. "Oh, I'm just here for moral support. That, and I didn't want to be stuck at home with only this asshole for company." She jabs her thumb at an empty corner.

"Hello, stepmother," says Silver Bird, stepping into the room. She's wearing a shiny, flowing suit of impossible metal and looks taller than her stepmother remembers.

"I've just had a lovely talk with Father," she says, her dark eyes twinkling merrily. "He's still alive, but you'll be relieved to hear that he won't be in the mood to seduce any serving maids for quite a while. I gave him a very impressive punch in the balls for two decades of being an ass to my mother and I."

 _"Ashbitch?"_ her stepmother barks, her voice tinged with laughter, and perhaps a hysterical edge of denial. "So you came crawling back, eh? I always knew you would. Take off that ridiculous thing and get this madwoman out of here, and maybe I won't lash you to--"

The first barehanded punch cracks her cheekbone, the second breaks her nose, and the third knocks the wind out of her. The stepmother tumbles backwards onto the bed, gasping and bleeding.

"I came here," Silver Bird says calmly. "To tell you that you are a hateful, narrow-minded old hag who coped with her own troubles by enjoying the pain of others. You ruined your daughters by teaching them to be the same. You made my life a living hell for absolutely no good reason, even though I would have done anything for your love when I was younger."

A knife sprouted from her glove, and she twirled it thoughtfully before letting it melt back into her wrist. "I was considering mutilating or killing you, but I think leaving you alive is punishment enough. Practically in this house, ignored by your daughters because you didn't give teach them how to love, fading to the margins of society because now people are judging your for _your_ looks..."

Silver Bird leans close to her stepmother, their noses almost touching. "...and knowing that I can come back and hurt your whenever I change my mind." She punched her stepmother once last time, this time with a metal fist, and the woman's eyes rolled up in her head as she topped back with a thump.

"Come on," Silver Bird said, taking Gretel's hand as they made their way out of the bedroom and down the steps.

"Feel better?" Gretel asked. Hansel didn't say anything; she didn't see him as much when she was touching Silver Bird, because those were moment when she didn't need an imaginary ghost to care for her.

"Much better," said Silver Bird. They stepped outside and her wings start unfolding, glittering in the moonlight. "Do you want to go burn your parents' house down?"

Gretel shrugged. "Eh, those idiots probably starved to death already. It's not worth it. Besides, we've got a much bigger world to explore we head to the tower."

"Yes, we do." Silver Bird glances at her wings and laughs to herself. "'Silver Bird'....tell me, do you think my mother was a touch clairvoyant?"

Gretel shrugs. "Maybe, or just very lucky."

She hops into Silver Bird's arms, not gripping too tight because she's not scared of falling. They rise up into the dark together, until from below they could be mistaken for one of the stars.

Sky fusses in her arms and Caterina strokes her daughter's hair, humming a lullaby. "Look, sweetheart," she says, holding Sky up so she can watch the passing trees. "This is where Mommy grew up."

They were riding in a carriage like no other, because Caterina's powers had expanded to animating wood and metal along with corpses. She had melded this strange vehicle into being, one that looked a lot like a normal carriage except that it had no horses or drivers, drifted high above the ground, and sent arrows bouncing off like spitballs.

"We'll visit your aunts first," Caterina explains as she returns Sky to her breast. "I'll let them know I'm okay, that I'm free. They'll be so _excited_ to see you, and you'll get to meet your cousins. She chews her lip thoughtfully. "I'll have to find out if my sisters' husbands are being nice to them, too. If they are, that'll be lovely. If they're not...well, I suppose I'll just to scare them into being nice.

"Then we'll visit your grandmother's grave, see if I can wake her up for a little bit. She's going to love you so much, Sky. And _than,_ we'll have to visit your grandfather, I suppose. Figure out if the old bastard is dead or alive. If he's sorry for sending me to my death. And if he's not, or not sorry enough, or maybe if he is..." she shrugged. "I guess whether I spare his live depends on what Mother says and what mood we're in. Does that sound like a plan, my little angel?"

Sky coos, defying gravity to drift a little bit out of her mother's arms before being gently tugged back down. She thought it sounding like a very good plan.

Red stalks through the world on silent feet, her breaths deep and slow. She walks without needing to rest, her ears pricked, her nostrils quivering.

She is not looking for prey. She is looking for the people who have been trapped, the ones who are abused or mocked, the ones looking to end themselves to take innocent lives.

She is looking for the people who face all kinds of suffering and torment, who believe themselves forgotten by the world.

She is looking for black boys fleeing from constables and little girls whose fathers can't stay out of their rooms and cripples whose crutches are being dragged away by bullies and small faiths who are attacked as heathens and elderly left to suffer in their beds and all the other victims.

She is looking for people to save, and monsters to kill. And she finds them, because her sense and skills are unmatched. She can cross miles in a heartbeat and heal from anything, even age.

Her mind is broken, but her heart is full of love and a desire to help.

She will visit the tower at times, but this is her quest from now until forever. Red wouldn't have it any other way.

Nightingale closed her eyes and melted into the great web of greenery that covers the world. She found her way to the descendants of the thorns that had once formed her prison and asked them about the man who had raped her in her sleep. After they had provided a description, she asked the trees where he went.

She sprouted from the ground in a garden at his palace, for of course he was a prince. She slithered through the halls, quiet as a snake, until she found his bedchamber. He was curled up snoring in the bed besides his wife. Nightingale had no quarrel with the wife, so she dropped a petal from a sleeping power down her throat and carried her into the privy, away from the mess.

Than she dropped a seed down the prince's snoring throat and waited for him to wake up.

When he did, he tried to call for the guards, only for a plant like no other to start growing inside him, ripping up his guts and pressing on his lungs. She spoke to him through the leaves of that plant, her quiet words vibrating through his skull, repeating over and over until they build into a burning scream inside his head.

She tells him about the children he gave her, and the fact that they are dead. She tells him that she will never be the same after his heartless, thoughtless attack. But she also tells him that she has come back from the darkness, that she has risen behind his attempts to destroy her, because she has people that love her and been given a chance to prove herself.

By the time the thorny roses burst through his mouth, he's been hacking great bursts of blood for the past time minutes. He lies on the bed, shredded from the inside out, twitching in his death throes. Nightingale looks at him for a second, before heading back to the garden and melting back to the earth.

On the way home she stops to disintegrate the witch who left her so vulnerable, because that bitch should have none better.

Melting into the ground and sprouting is one of the faster ways of travel, so Nightingale returns home before the others. She finds Rapunzel about behind the tower, sitting cross legged as great tendrils of her massive, regrown hair move up and down the back walls, clutching paintbrushes. "How'd it go?" she asks.

"Fine," says Nightingale. Saying the word requires a bit of effort, as speaking sometimes does for her, but she does it anyway because even incomplete recovery is better than no recovery at all. "What are you working on?" she asks.

"My dreams," says Rapunzel. The wall is covered with impossible flowers, faces of the beloved dead, roaring monsters and bloody battlefield, landscapes of kaleidoscope strangeness.

Nightingale sits besides her, content with just watching the other girl work, for now.

Our characters grow and change and develop, far more than could be described by a single story. They slowly reshape the world around them, making it a little bit better than had found it. They burn brightly through dark times and light ones alike.

And they are here to teach us the message of all stories: that the impossible can be possible, that monsters can be slain, that sometimes you have to leave your old life behind to find the one you deserve, that everyone deserves to be loved and develop their potential. Sappy things, cliches, and all the more true for it.

This is an age of witches, and we all have the potential to cast beautiful and terrible spells.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to comment. If anyone acts like a bigot or creep, I will hunt them down on my broom and do creative things with their entrails.


End file.
